two thousand one hundred and ninety six kilometers
dedicated to my one and only, liberta.
It happens surprisingly fast. Papers, contracts, agents and the press spin around in his head as he's lacing up to train for the quarters, but in barely two evenings his agent informs him that all he has to do is sign two pieces of paper and it would be done; next season, he'd be wearing sky blue in the grey stadiums of Manchester. It wasn't his first choice (he distinctly remembers Villa raising his eyebrows when he first considered it- but they all didn't have FC Heaven's Own Children chasing them for 40 million euros, did they?), but as he's discussed with his parents and Unai, it wasn't a bad one, either.
Villa took it well, well enough, considering--. He had shrugged when David quietly informed him the deal was done over team dinner, and kissed the dessert off his lips a little harder than usual when they went up to their rooms later. "It's football, no?" he'd gasped between kisses that reeked please-don't-leave-mes and promise-me-it'll-work-outs and other unspoken secrets, and later they'd slept with fingers and limbs entangled, and Silva told himself he was quielty content, because they were going to win the fucking world cup and Manchester isn't as cold as they say, and because Villa valued loyalty with his heart, and he wouldn't leave, he wouldn't.
Later, when they actually did win the fucking World Cup, and after they fuck and drink and dance like idiots through the next few dizzying days, and him and David are lying together in their shared hotel room in some fancy nothing-is-too-good-for-our-champions hotel, drunk enough to talk, but too sober to be tactful, Villa blurts out,
"They won't know there, you know."
David shifts in the white starched sheets uncomfortably, moving to kiss Villa to silence.
"No, I mean," he protests, "Mmm...It's just...I'm used to keeping it a secret around the boys, you know, Xavi and Andres and Carles, you know...and England..."
"Why are you telling me this?" he looks at Villa, propping his head up on his elbows, frowning slightly. "Trying to get me to have second thoughts?"
Villa looks at him like he's been caught out, and David smiles grimly, sadly, his hand slipping tiredly from under him as he slumps lazily on his side.
"My medical is in a few days, Villa. It's happening."
"I'm only pointing out that it won't be easy, it isn't easy, not everybody is like Unai..."
David puts a hand at the back of Villa's neck, pulls him into a deep kiss.
"I'll be okay," he whispers against him, pressing their foreheads together. "We'll be okay," he adds, because Villa looked like he needed to hear that.
Villa falls asleep soon after, snoring in that obnoxious way he always denies doing later, even when Silva laughs and plays him the recording he took on his phone. Silva closes his eyes and wills himself to follow suit, but outside, he can hear the cars honk and faint cries of the Spanish guards petrolling the hotel gates and everything sounds painfully like home, like Unai clapping his back after a bad game and asking him quietly if everything was okay with him and Villa, like the bad jokes Joaquin makes if he misses a cross from Villa at training, "so who's sleeping on the couch tonight?", and he has to force himself not to wonder.
* * *
The boys at Manchester are nice enough. The club was at a strange but not uncomfortable period of its growth; it had an awkward assortment of born and bred English lads, some not prepared for the club's sudden rise in expectations and fame and cautious foreigners, not knowing what to expect from a club that had achieved little thus far but was posied for greatness. It wasn't terribly hard to gel in, however: the british lads, for what all their flaws may be, grinned at David when they passed him in the halls and sometimes yelled unintelligbly at him when he scored in training; David was only a little frustrated that what they spoke honestly sounded like nothing in his Learn-To BBC videos or his tutor from London at all.
He hung with the Spanish speakers out of necessity for a good portion of the first few months- he'd never been the best at picking up languages. Villa had once, on a whim, decided to teach him Asturian; three months later, when he couldn't even remember how to say "I don't speak Asturian" in Asturian and Mata was on the floor after hearing his attempt at it, he'd promptly given up. It didn't matter much anyway: he understood "kick" and "get up" and "give me four laps" and "quit fooling around, Hart" during training, and sometimes he would think it was better this way, especially to feign ignorance when they asked too many questions.
He found it hard to remember how to keep secrets, sometimes. When Macini asked him if he wasn't keeping well after a small dry spell a few months into the season, he had to bite his lip before he could confess that Villa hadn't called in a while, that Messi hugged him a little too much after that match against Osasuna, that his little brother had just failed geometry (alright, the last one, he was sure the mister wouldn't be scandalized to hear, but he was pretty sure Unai Emery was the only coach in the world who demanded such information not be withheld from him, and he was in the habit of sharing these kinds of things, now.) When a couple of lads invited him to a bar to celebrate after a few particularly hard games, and he watched Tevez clumsily dance with some girl, he had to cover up a broken "Weesh Veeyah was heur, no?" with a cough and splutter that nearly caused him to choke on their country's prized english gin and tonic.
"What was that?" yelled Johnson over the loud, grating music, as he offered David a few napkins, helping his wipe the drink off his shirt.
"Weesh my-- my girl-friend was here, no?" he yelled back, because he has a sudden whim to share his loneliness. Villa hadn't called again, and yeah, it was understandable, classico this, training that, but he'd caught a bit of Braveheart on TV last night, and it was raining again, and fish and chips takeaway never quite tasted like home.
"I didn't know you had a girlfriend," Johnson cracked a wide grin, slapping his shoulder. David smiled sheepishly, retiring into his drink and quiet, apologetic privacy. It's clear Johnson wasn't one to give up easily, though, winking at him as he got up to dance with a girl with heavy eye makeup and a rather large necklace and repeatedly asking Silva through the night if he didn't want to dance with some "nice English girl." David rolled his eyes at his unsubtle humour and too loud laugh, but something inside him tugged when he realizes this is the first time he's talked about Villa in months, even if the Villa was a dark haired young spanish girl "from Sevilla," he assured Johnson. "Sex must've been a cracker, if you're doing long distance and all," leered Bridge, who had apparently been listening, poking his head from behind Johnson. David coloured appropriately and Johnson laughed and thumped Bridge's back with a "not everyone's got shagging on the brain all the time like you, mate, not these demure Spanish lads", but inside David's thinking of the last time he kissed Villa and the loneliness sunk in just a little more.
* * *
David gets into a routine as the season yawns lazily into its midway point, though he's not sure if that means he's used to the new circumstances or not. A few months of secrecy, of not waking up to Villa's warm morning breath against his cheek, of constantly making up facts about his "girlfriend" (he'd stopped trying temporarily, though, when he almost fondly described her soulpatch to Johnno), felt like a holiday, a testing but temporary deviation from normality, but with the cold of the winter setting in from September and going strong in late November, soon the grating permancy of it all began to sink in. The days went by fairly quickly, the muddy slide tackles in training and the still-lingering-should-have-died-in-August jokes of "De Jong will kick you in the chest if you don't come with us to the bar tonight, Silva" and the endless mushy peas on the fish and chips, but the weeks themselves drag, and often when David was tieing his shoelaces and looking at the Barcelona calendar that Nando's bought, perhaps purposely, the cheeky teenager he is, for the living room, he's surprised at how little time has passed between the several rapid fire days.
The other boys grow to like him, even the english ones now, who're always tugging him insistently into their karoke nights and celebration parties and poolside lunches with their girlfriends and wives, even if his english is still, as Barry once tactfully put it, "fucking sad." He thinks its because they respect him despite his silence, respect the quiet way he allows his feet to talk for him and swears ferociously on the pitch if any opposition thinks they can take advantage of his size and the way he rolls his eyes with casual indifference at their puns, above them even if he didn't understand them.
"How much would they like you if they you you were a maricon, though?" laughs Villa lazily on the phone, but there's something that sounds more like sadness and apology in his voice than humour.
"Shut up, David," he says, a sudden memory flashing in his mind: summer, cups, Madrid, sheets. Sometimes, it feels like Villa says things nowadays just to provoke him, irritable sparks in their relationship because it's slow, because it's uneasy, because stolen holidays and occasional internationals aren't enough. That night, fittingly enough, he can't sleep again..
"You look like shit," comments Johnno the next morning, as they jog side by side, half of David's face hidden behind a giant muffler to block the cold. David shrugs.
"Broke up with my girlfriend," he explains- he's been meaning to tell them that for a while, the lies too elaborate to elaborate on any further at this point. There's an odd feeling in his stomach, however, at the loss of his fictional girlfriend, much like a stone dropping right through it. Villa's still with you, he reminds himself, but there's that horrible moment when he feels like he's not sure, and another, as horrible one that follows, when he looks behind him to search out Vicente, to talk to him about it, or maybe Unai, and then Mancini calls at them to come to the center and there are no ridiculously huge blow up dummies tripping him over when he turned to look, and he remembered where he was.
* * *
Villa might have been saying it just to piss him off, but David notices things that make him uncomfortable sometimes, little things he'd forgotten to worry about in the last few years at Valencia. There was a time when Bridge had laughed at Hart letting a penalty slip between his fingers in training and told Joe he "played like a fag"; David had felt a strong urge to kick a football at his teeth and tell him, "No, this is how you play like a fag." Even Barry, who David had come to respect, once chuckled at a fanletter an admiring gay fan had sent to him, and people often would beckon Milner to do "that impression of that queer down West street" again, laughter echoing in the locker room. David sometimes wonders idly if this was how they'd laugh at him, if they knew. Maybe there'd be nothing to know, he thinks bitterly to himself, remembering he hadn't spoken to Villa since the hastily day they had spent together during Villa's winter break.
The topic of gay footballers, though, usually never came into the locker room; not that there was time for it between pep talks and crude girlfriend-tit-size compairisons and bad SMS jokes and "who wants to play FIFA at Gary's tonight?"s, which is why David didn't feel particularly bad for eavesdropping when he heard Milner and Barry murmuring to eachother near Milner's lockers after a game.
"No, honest, Johnson let something slip to me and a few guys on the English squad, they've always kind of suspected, you know?"
"Well, fuck me. He's married, mate. And besides, he's a fucking hard lad--"
"I don't know, those Spanish men, apparently, eh?"
"You sure De Jong and Stevie aren't mates?"
Barry pauses and looks at Milner, frowning in confusion. James cracks up, nudging Gary's rib half heartedly.
"Maybe that's why he kicked him, eh?"
Barry rolls his eyes and cuffs Milner's neck amicably. Adam appears out of nowhere between them and David and the noise of the room eventually drowns them out. He sits quietly, fiddling with his already untied shoelaces, his mind piecing together what he just heard. Johnno's sat next to him and is saying something about "good match, eh?" but he can hardly hear him.
It's a crazy idea, to be sure, it's just plain out ridiculous. He isn't even sure if he heard right, if he assumed right- goddamn their accents. But there's something in the abscences at the strange accented english chatters of the locker room and the absence of a warm body pressed against his in relief and triumph, and the absence of the tiny wink one of the other boys would give the two of them. There's something in the absence of hearing a familiar voice say, "good goal, man,", and there's something about his phone screen being blank, no missed calls or messages on its glossy display.
It's a crazy fucking idea. And yet--
"Hey, Pepe? It's Silva here. Mind if I um, if I ask you the phone number of Steven Gerrard?"
* * *
Later, David would wonder what the fuck he was thinking, except the truth was that he wasn't thinking at the time, just nervously clicking through the English language dictionaries and the odd conjugation website on his laptop and tapping his foot impatiently against the floor as the ringing continued against his ear.
"'lo?" comes a gruff voice from the other end.
David nearly drops the phone.
Stevie's first reaction, when David begins to stumble through his story in google-translated English, is to cut the phone and write it off as some sort of bad joke or bad dream. Pepe had told him to expect a call from Silva- and he thinks it's only as a favour to his keeper that he's still hanging on to the line, with this - this kid- who sounded younger than he was in his stumbling insecurities- talking to him about things he wanted to erase, he wanted to forget, the nightmares with sour aftertastes. There's something in him that pushes him to deny everything, to tell this lost sounding boy at the other end of the line that he was crazy, that he must have misheard - whoever he heard the rumours from, fuck, he’d have to look into that later, was it that obvious? - but then there's also something in Silva's soft voice, the way the Spanish rubs against the broken English, the way his half sentences hang heavy with hard questions, the way he-
Stevie recognizes the loneliness.
"So..." says Silva, haltingly, "So...is my story. So, is true? You and...you and Xabi? Porq--because...you know... because."
He says Shahhbee with that perfect Spanish curl around the Shhs and Rrs that Xabi tried to teach Stevie on lazy nights in Champions-league-city-hotels, in the way Stevie has never been able to master. Stevie thinks of how they've left, all of them, Fernando and Masche and Xabi and the We've got the best midfield in the whole worlds and the season and Roy and he sighs heavily, nodding.
"Yeah," he grunts. "Yeah it's...yeah."
There's a pause. Then, Silva speaks softly.
"So...but...you're over him now? Because of...of distance, si? You are...you are happy..more happy now?"
There's something that sounds a lot like a plea in his voice. Stevie pictures Istanbul, kisses, stars, trophies, injuries, insecurities, Roy, flight tickets, 0-0s and 'you have (0) unread messages's. He pictures matches, and accents, and fights and 'why the fuck are you leaving's and 'it's not about you, you know that, no?'s and he closes his eyes.
"Yes." he says, flatly. "Yes, I'm over him.”
* * *
January is cold.
When Silva recounts this observation to his brother, Nando rolls his eyes and and thanks him, Captain Obvious, but that’s not what Silva meant; January is cold: cold in a way that’s biting and unforgiving and bitter coffee on Sunday mornings that’s too hot against the sharp chill; cold in a way that’s ice dangling off tall gates and frozen dew; cold in a way that he’s out of his last tin of imported Cola Cao; cold in a way that’s the fact that Villa still hasn’t called after his break, and he knows they just lost to Betis and he needs time, but perhaps January is cold in a way that’s that Silva is running out of time to give.
They lose, a few days later, to Villa. Silva calls it Aston Veeyah later but nobody laughs, and Johnno only claps his back in silence before he gathers his clothes and leaves for the showers. The locker room isn’t depressed, and there’s no reason it should be-they were still sitting comfortably at a more comfortable third than Valencia had accomplished in a while, but it was as somber as was appropriate after a loss, and David sighs to the silence when he kicks off his boots and a sock. He tips his head back against the wall as he swings his half-socked feet in and out from under his seat. He looks at his phone out of habit now, but he doesn’t expect anything, staring blankly at the glossy screen. He considers throwing it against the opposite locker and watching the pieces of glass crunch and shatter, inviting whoever was left in the fucking room to look up and start because this was just one of the many fucking secrets they didn’t know about David Silva. His knuckles clench and whiten around the thin body of the phone until he thinks it would leave marks, red indicators of pressure it was cutting against his palm.
He puts it in his pocket instead.
That night, Pepe calls. Seeing the name on the screen, Silva is briefly discomfited, after he is briefly disturbed and briefly annoyed by the shrill of his old “We are the Champions” ring tone cutting through his shallow sleep at 3 a.m. He bites his lip as his fingers toy at the edge of the phone, debating with himself. He feels a small bubble of nervousness in his belly, and hovers over the “reject call” button. It would be easy not to answer, to pretend the phone hadn’t woken him up-to avoid Pepe for weeks till the phonecall with Gerrard blows over-but instead, he finds himself sliding a thumb across the screen and letting out an awkward greeting. “Hello?”
“Hola, poni.” There’s a pause, and rustling, fidgeting. “Sorry about your game, hombre.”
Silva lets out a breath, and doesn’t ask, you called in the middle of the night to tell me this?. “Yeah,” he says cautiously instead, “We’ll live, it’s…it’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Pepe laughs, forced. “You’re doing so well, no? Better than us.”
Silva doesn’t reply to that, and the conversation dies into the silence of their breathing and the soft rain outside. He opens his mouth. He wants to point out that this pretense was stupid, that they both knew he wasn’t talking calling at 3 a.m. to talk football (he isn’t Xavi, for fuck’s sake), that they should just get this over with because this awfully familiar twist of worry is beginning to cramp David’s stomach. He opens his mouth, and Pepe says,
“Silva. I talked, I talked to Stevie.”
Outside, there is a distant low hum of jazz that accompanies the drizzle, from a club right next to the hotel in London they were staying at.
“Silva,” Pepe continues, voice uncertain, when David doesn’t reply, “Enano, eh…there’s something I want you to know about...about him, Stevie.”
Silva isn’t sure what to say to that. His clutch on the phone tightened, and he leans against the headboard, eyes closed and head full of whispers that he hadn’t let himself hear in a while: does he know? does he know? It was strange, because he had been hiding for so long in Manchester that he had become used to it again, used to easy lies rolling off his lips, aided by the convenient ability to feign mistranslation and a lack of understanding of a foreign language -- but getting caught in Manchester was never a fear the way it had always been in Spain: Villa was too far away and Silva still dreamt in Spanish. Somewhere, in the two thousand one hundred and ninety six kilometers that separated Valencia and Manchester, he had forgotten what it meant to keep secrets.
Now that Pepe was on the edge of knowing, Silva felt sick in a way he had no idea how to handle.
“Pepe,” he says, and his voice is suddenly urgent, “Pepe, I can explain-”
“Poni, hear me out. Stevie gets, he’s a little…quick with his words sometimes, says things he doesn’t mean. Don’t-don’t take Stevie at first glance, okay?”
It was the slowing down of Silva’s heartbeat that allowed him to realize that it had sped in the first place. “What?” he says with a frown, eyebrows knitting together, “Pepe-,”
“No, no, listen, escuchame, por favor. Talk to Stevie again, okay? Or don’t, but-don’t believe everything he says in one go.”
Silva’s tension is slowly knitting into confusion, as he draws his knees to his chin. “Pepe, what-,”
“Give him a second chance,” Pepe rushes out.
“Maybe,” says Silva, after a long silence, fingers picking at the isolated little threads feebly poking out of his covers. “Maybe.”
He can hear Pepe exhale, the air pushed out against the mouthpiece, and he refuses to wonder who they both were really talking about. That night, he sleeps uneasily, thinking about secrets and magazine covers and goal celebrations and blackmail and best friends and spies.
* * *
The night of February the 6th, when 23 English players board a flight to Cophenhagen, Stevie gets on a plane to Madrid.
When he steps out of the airport, it is 11:00 p.m., and it is dark. Stevie frowns into low, blue glow of the moon, and hails a taxi, adjusting his dark glasses and looking around furtively for lurking photographers and journalsits. As he shuts the door of the little cab, the driver asks him, “Adonde, señor?” and it is then he realizes that even if he did how to answer that, he would not know how to express it well enough. He stays silent, and the driver repeats his question, impatience lacing his voice.
“Uh...a moment, un momento,” says Stevie, cursing his awkward accent and fishing out his phone. “Pepe,” he says, when a sleepy voice answers with a curse, “Pepe, don’t say anything, you smug bastard, -- un bloody momento, mate-- just..I’ve got a lad here driving me taxi, I need you to give him an address in Madrid, okay? I never got it written down---”
He hands the phone to the bemused driver, and then sits back in his seat, fingers uselessly scratching against the leather, tiredness and sunglasses making the view at the borders of Bajaras a dark and indistinct blur, tuning out the rapid Spanish that is being fired in the front seat. He’s half asleep when the taxi screeches to an apologetic halt, and awakens with a start, rubbing his eyes. “Ch--Gracias,” he nods at the driver, and shoves a few euros into his hands. Standing in front of the tall, white house, he by old impulse looks behind him. The taxi has driven away. He rings the bell.
“It’s Stevie,” is all he says, when a wary voice says something in Spanish through the intercom. There’s a pause, a lengthy one, and then, finally: “Wait. I’ll just be out.” Stevie doesn’t say anything, only wraps his arms together and leans against the gate, breathing in the cold.
Xabi opens the gate in his loose shorts and a sweater without a shirt underneath, and there’s something startlingly intimate about seeing him like that, not put together, not in a kit, either, an intimacy Stevie has forgotten how to wear. He looks wide awake, though tired, and he looks at Stevie with a mild curiosity that’s more careful than genuine. “Stevie?” he says, and Stevie’s hand rubs the back of his neck nervously. “What are you doing here?”
“Got meself out of international duty,” mumbles Stevie, and at the very least, it’s the start of the truth. “Thought I’d drop by, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Almost two years,” says Xabi. Someone had to say it, better sooner than later.
“Yeah,” Stevie clears his throat, “Like I said. A while.”
Xabi opens his mouth. Xabi does not say, you come in here after so long and expect me to just let you back in? Xabi does not say, I know we fought, but I thought you said you would call. Xabi does not say, telling the press you’re “devastated” is not what I wanted from you. Xabi does not say, but someday, we all had to go back home. Xabi says, “what do you want?” and Stevie doesn’t say many things, but Stevie says, “A drive.”
Xabi runs a hand through his hair. It’s the same, everything about him is the same, except the stubble, maybe, even the way he frowns and the calmness in his tone and the deepness of his voice. “Nagore will wonder,” he says, and then a second later, “Let me change.”
“Don’t,” Stevie says suddenly, reaching out and wrapping a hand around his wrist when the other man turns away. The contact singes both their skins, even though it’s two degrees outside and the chill bit. Stevie lets go uncertainly, and shrugs, “What you’re wearing is fine.” Xabi stares at him like he’s insane, and Xabi’s ability to pack condescension into a gaze should never be underestimated, but Stevie just stares back at him and Xabi finally concedes, and shrugs. “This way,” he says, and motions towards the garage.
They ride for almost an hour, and they ride in what transforms from a deeply uncomfortable silence to a comfortably sparse conversation, with sign-posts and orange brick houses and small memories rolling behind them, only speaking occasionally about which turn to take, or congratulating each other for their last results (both wins) or Xabi giving a small laugh when Stevie’s forehead wrinkles and he attempts to pronounce the street names.
“So, that Fernando drama,” Xabi says, at one point.
“People leave,” Stevie replies.
“Didn’t sleep after the match, then?” Stevie asks Xabi, at another point.
“You know my post-match insomnia,” smiles Xabi ruefully, and there’s something that links the curl of his lips straight to Stevie’s voice, which catches.
“Yeah,” he tears his gaze away from his smile, looking back out at the road, “Yeah, I do.”
“Reading again, then?” Stevie says, after a while. “Some Spanish book?”
“The Royal Game,” he smiles.
“A book about cricket?” Stevie feigns horror.
Xabi throws his head back and laughs, and it’s a wonderful sound. “Chess,” he says, and Stevie grins knowingly at that, you-would dancing at the edge of the curve of his lips.
They’re at the edge of the city when Xabi stops, and they both get out into the empty road and the silence, stepping in front of the car. Xabi elegantly perches himself on the bonnet of the car, and Stevie leans far back enough on it for his body to be somewhat aligned to him, although they don’t touch. Xabi pulls out a cigarette packet from his pocket, and a lighter.
“I thought you quit,” says Stevie, nose wrinkling. Xabi shrugs. “Only once in a while, and it’s cold tonight,” he says. Only when I’m nervous.
“So,” Stevie stretches comfortably against the metal, “Tell me more about the chess book of yours. Didn’t know you played, really, though I should have suspected.”
Xabi expells smoke from between his lips, and then looks at him, taking a deep breath. “Why are you here, Stevie?”
Stevie pauses, and then tugs himself up on the bonnet. Before Xabi could say anything, he kisses him on the lips, tasting cold tobacco and warm familiarity, and one, two beats later, Xabi responds, a moan muffled against his mouth and a hand-- and it’s startling how muscle memory can extend to the feel of a grip or a mental map of another’s body in the tip of your fingers-- and for a long time, they don’t stop.
“Stevie,” Xabi whispers, when they break off, his breath ragged, his cigarette fallen to the ground, still glowing faintly in the moonlight, his hands on Stevie’s chest, in a move to push him away. “Stevie,” he clears his throat so his voice could stronger, and says, “Stevie, you can’t just come in here, and expect everything to be the same, you can’t just--”
Stevie looks Xabi right in the eye, and there’s a certainty in them that Xabi’s forgotten, because he hasn’t seen it in two years, three years, a certainty that faded away with fights and transfers and their relationship. “Xabi, I’m sorry,” and it’s more than Xabi wanted to hear two years ago, and less than what Xabi had expected now, but it still doesn't feel enough.
“You want us to pick up where we left off?” says Xabi, finally.
“No,” Stevie shakes his head, “We didn’t leave off in a good place. I want to--,” he looks at Xabi in the eye again, and his hands are perfectly still, on Xabi’s shoulders, against the worn sweater. “I want to start over, Xabi.”
“So you can remember why you stopped?” Xabi’s voice is soft.
“I remember why I stopped,” says Stevie steadily. “I was scared.”
Xabi’s fists curl around the material of Stevie’s jumper. “And now?”
“Now everything I was scared of has already happened,” Stevie inhales deeply. “Now I have nothing to lose.”
* * *
Stepping back into Spain is never the ceremony that Silva expects it to be.
It’s different, of course it is; the streets are warmer and drier, even in February’s cold, and the sun rays honey the pavement, and there’s rumbles and whispers in Spanish all around, and everything is coloured different: brighter, more curious, more like home. But it’s never the great moment of homecoming that he always expect: there’s no sharp shock of contrast, or incisive pang of nostalgia, only the distant sound of music that filters from shop-radios and the freshly painted graffiti on the wall, and the feeling that he had never left, even if Spain had left him.
The atmosphere when the national team reunites is rarely sombre, but it’s a lazy winter afternoon and every one’s still in club-mode, so the Madridistas and Culés stick to different tables at dinner, and different sections of the hotel after. He had ended up rooming with Marche, as always, who talked to him in his deep, quiet way about Villareal and Valencia, about moving, about Emery, and Valenciano paellas, and bats and vultures, and it calmed him to just sit back and listen, not think for a while, toying with the remote control as his feet dangled off the edge of the bed opposite Carlos’s.
Inevitably, however, Marche asks him about Villa, and Silva has to bite his lip. “We met,” he says, and they had. It had been an awkward greeting, because Villa had been surrounded by his team-mates in the lobby, throwing his head back and laughing at something Xavi or Pique had been saying. When their eyes had met, they had given each other tentative and awkward smiles; yet they hugged warmly enough, inhaling the familiar warmth of each other’s bodies, and faded smell of freshly washed team shirts. David had, however, felt every muscle of Villa’s tense under the gazes of the blaugranas that observed them, letting his grip slacken around the other man, in a calculated imitation of being platonic.
“Talk tonight?” Villa had gruffly clapped his shoulder. “Post dinner?”
“I need to sleep early,” Silva had replied. “Game.”
“That’s it?” Marche asks.
“That’s it,” Silva replies, flopping on his stomach, feeling the cool side of the pillow calm his flushed face. He breathes in the scent of starch and lemon freshener, silent and still until he hears Marche click the lights off, and shuffle his feet off the floor and into bed.
He doesn’t start the game the next day, and after the World Cup, he’s really not surprised. He sits on the bench squeezed between Llorente and Marche, trying to maintain as much of a distance as he could from Pepe, not wanting a repeat of that cryptic conversation on the phone. He watches the match dully, picturing the last time he had played at the Bernabeu. It was almost a year ago, he realized, and it simultaneously felt so distant and so close. He watches Villa’s face screw up in frustration as a pass he serves Pedro skims off the goalie’s hand: he had less lines on his face, then, less stubble, that day, but no less frustration. Villa had fucked him later in the showers, and he had whimpered and bitten his own forearm in a bid to stay as quiet as he could, attuned to any surrounding sounds even though it was “just Valencia”; later, they had watched old soaps until 2 a.m. on their room’s clunky television set, fingers intertwined between their tired bodies.
Llorente makes a sudden noise beside him, and Silva is jolted back into attention, just in time to see Villa miss horrifically, letting a shot he could have easily edged diagonally past the line just brush off the side post. “Puta madre,” hisses Llorente, “That could have been the one that bet Raúl’s record.” Silva stares blankly at the ball, as it soars its way into the Spanish half. He had forgotten Villa was at the cusp of that historical record, even if he could never forget how much that would mean to Villa. He eyes him on the pitch, a figure in sweat-soaked blue, running with slumped shoulders back to the halfway line, a frown souring his face.
One of the trainers calls him when the game is in its last ten minutes, and he’s beckoned on the field. Villa’s jogging towards him, not looking too pleased, although he does break into a rueful half-smile as he reaches the edge of the pitch. He ruffles his hair, and mutters, “Go get them, poni,” and Silva meets his eyes for a brief second before he runs on to the grass, nodding at Andrés as the ball hits his feet.
“Great goal,” Villa says to him later, and it sounds a lot like “how ironic,” but in a way that’s more sad than bitter, resignation weighing the shoulders he rolled back in a stretch, as he tugs a shirt out of his locker. Silva shrugs, rolling down his socks and muttering, “It should have been you.”
Villa slams his locker shut, and wipes the sweat off his pale chest with his bunched up shirt. “I was shit,” he replies finally, with characteristic brutal honesty. “Nothing new there,” he adds, and now the bitterness crept into his voice, close to being palpable. Silva gives him a look that’s half upset and half exasperated, but it’s a bad time, because Villa snaps, as he folds the towel irately around himself, “Oh, sorry, for bringing it up, I forgot you didn’t care.”
“What the--” begins Silva heatedly, temper flaring, and then looks around, as though remembering where they were. But the locker room was empty; the two of them were used to lingering when they shared one, pretending to take longer with their clothes-- and they had done so again, by sheer force of habit. “--fuck, what the fuck, Villa,” he continues, voice dropping to a hiss, “Don’t take this match out on me, it’s only a friendly anyway, fuck.”
“It’s not just about the--” Villa rolls his head back, sighing, “Fuck it.” They stand in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, each half dressed, Villa’s hands folded across his chest.
“David,” Silva tries finally, because someone had to. Villa looks at him warily, and he looks like he’s aged the year that stretched between them, and Silva swallows down the guilt and the anger alike, putting his hands on David’s shoulders, feeling the shock of familiarity as his fingers pressed Villa’s bare, sweaty skin. “David,” he tries again, and suddenly they’re kissing, Villa tugging him backwards as his back presses against the wall. Silva makes a noise against his Villa’s lips, one that is protesting and demanding more and angry and desperate all at once, and his teeth catch at Villa’s lower lip, feeling iron and sweat and nostalgia and need against his tongue. He sobs into the kiss, because it’s too much and too sudden and painfully, obviously not enough, all at once. His hand fists into Villa’s hair, and Villa breathes raggedly when their break apart, and Silva stares at him.
“Why didn’t you call?”
Villa’s fingers are against his lower back, his fingertips marking pressure points on Silva’s skin. He shakes his head.
“I’m sor--,” he begins, then stops, as though that wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. “I was having--”
“Joder,” cries Silva, because it’s been boiling inside him for too long, and because none of the beginnings of Villa’s sentences sounded like they would have endings he would have liked. “Joder, David, why didn’t you just call?” His fingers are digging sharply enough into Villa’s shoulders to leave marks, marks Villa never allowed him to leave, because he was always somebody else’s, Barca’s, Pati’s, his ambition’s. Silva feels himself shaking, and Villa has a glistening red streak of blood in the middle of his lower lip. “You fucking selfish bastard, I--”
“Telephone lines work two ways, Silva,” bites Villa suddenly in response, and Silva knows he had prodded the edge of the apology too long, allowing it to twist into anger. He stares into Villa’s intense, angry brown eyes, trying to read them. He has just opened his mouth to respond, when suddenly, they both hear a creak of the door and spring apart so fast that Silva trips and his shin hits the edge of the bench below their lockers, wincing in pain. Xabi walks in, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” he says, after a pause. His eyes look tired, like he had not slept in a few days, though they were bright. “I forgot my phone here.” Silva is still rubbing his shin, and it feels like Villa beside him had stopped breathing entirely. He watches Xabi with the corner of his eye, as the other man picks up a Blackberry from off the opposite bench and tucks into his pocket.
“See you,” he says, as Xabi leaves through the door, and Villa grunts something, too.
“Thanks,” he frowns, after the door closes, indicating at the bruise on his shin. Villa ignores him, still staring after Xabi, groaning when the other man shut the door, his knees giving way as he slumps to the floor.
“That was close,” he breathes, pressing his palms to his face. He sits like that for a long time, silent, Silva too, rubbing his face with his hands. “I told you the hiding would get to us,” he says finally, looking up at Silva.
“You said the hiding would get to me,” Silva points out acidly, folding his arms.
“And now I realize that we are not in Valencia anymore, Silva,” Villa closes his eyes. “Things are different now. Fuck, it’s just-- there’s nowhere we can just-- and having to hide constantly, it’s fucking hard. You’re fighting about a phone call in a month? There are bigger things going on here.”
“Don’t condescend to me,” it’s Silva’s turn to snap. “You think I’m not feeling that? You think I don’t realize that? Pepe called me the other day. About us”
Villa’s eyebrows fly into his hair. He opens his mouth, but Silva cuts him off.
“Don’t waste your breath asking if he knows, because that’s not the fucking point.” He rubs the back of his neck furiously with his hand, feeling the flesh burn under his palm. “The point is, he was asking, and-- I felt like I was going to throw up, I was so fucking scared-- and I realized that that was the first time in months I had felt that way, felt legitimately afraid of someone finding us out.”
“So?” says Villa, and it sounds like a challenge. Silva looks down at him, and he shakes his head.
“So the point is that Valencia didn’t make us fall in...in love, Villa! They let us be...in love, but they didn’t-- and wherever we are now, Barcelona, City-- they’re not making us go off each other like this, either!” Silva exhales, his face flushed, heated, running a hand through his hair. “We were fucking broken weeks before I felt fucking scared of being found out, Villa,” he presses the heel of his palm to his throbbing temple, “Let’s not ignore the facts.”
Villa narrows his eyes at him. Silva makes a noise in his throat, and slips on the cotton shirt he’d pulled out from his bag, wishing his face would cool down, his body stop feeling like it was trembling, not wanting to stay a minute longer in the showers. He turns on his heel, making for the door, when he hears a shuffle beside him, as though Villa had moved to get off the floor.
He pauses, then twists the knob of the door anyway. “It’s not the hiding that’s wearing me down, Guaje,” he murmurs, and the old nickname that slips from his lips startles him. He had been audible enough for David to hear, judging by the pause in his shuffling. “It’s you,” he finishes, as he pushes open the door.
* * *
There are things you can get used to, Silva thinks, lying back on the grass after training’s ended, a few of the boys sitting a few feet away, Johnno, he thinks, and Shaun and maybe Hart, their loud voices and louder accents carrying across the vast expanse of the training ground. You can get used to the acidity of the tartar sauce on fish and chips, the oil dripping off between your fingers. You can get used to the squeak of sole to mud, when it rains, and you can get used to the colouring of the sky. You can get used to forcing a foreign language through your lips; you can get too used to it to have to blush when the words knot your tongue, again.
You can definitely get used to goals, and victories, and awards, and fans pumping their fists in the air, and Merlin! Merlin! Merlin!, and hard kicks to the shin, and english swearwords, and to stepping on the pitch and feeling like you’re the center of the team, feeling like you’re pulling strings and goals and hearts with your kicks, feeling like every thing’s changed, but every thing is okay.
You can get used to ignoring calls on the phone. You can get so used to it, your fingers automatically fly to the red “disconnect” button when you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket; and later, you can get used to looking at the blankness of your phone screen, looking at the “(0) missed calls.” You can get used to tabloids. You can get used to tea.
You can get used to being okay, Silva thinks, driving back home through the thinning traffic on the evening roads. You can get used to this, he thinks, sitting at the window of his bedroom, looking at the neon lights of the still-open take-outs from across the road.
When the phone rings, he jumps, and a bubble of hope that he later feels guilty about swells inside him. But it’s not Villa on the phone, it’s an unknown number from out of town. Silva frowns, but he’s curious enough to pick it up, and a vaguely familiar voice filters through.
“‘Lo?”
This time, Silva does not nearly drop the phone. This time, Silva asks, “Gerrard?” because he had deleted the number off his phone.
“Eh...yeah, mate, it’s me.” There’s rustling on his end. Silva’s has a sinking feeling already about this; he wasn’t ready for another phone conversation about something he didn’t want to discuss with someone who knew much more than he was comfortable with, anyway.
“Gerrard,” he says into the phone, hesitantly, “Yes? Anything I can do for you?”
“I want to uh, talk,” comes the thick accent in reply, “About what we...talked about earlier.”
Talking to Gerrard seems harder this time, even excluding the gap they had in communicaton; it seems like pulling teeth to get the other man to come to his point, and Silva realizes that the other call was only easier because he was doing most of the talking.
“I’m happy for you, Gerrard,” says Silva politely, when he’s done digesting whatever scraps of English he could ingest from what Gerrard had been telling him. “Xabi looks happy. Say to him I say congratulations.”
“That’s not my point, mate,” sighs Gerrard on the other end. “My point is that...you shouldn’t do what I did. And I feel like I made you, you know, with me advice to you the last time. You...you got me thinking, mate. I need to return the favour.”
Silva pauses, drawing his knees to his chest. “Okay,” he says finally, simply, because his vocabulary was too limited for the complicated thoughts swimming in his head.
“You think it’s not my place to give advice,” comes Gerrard’s voice in reply. Silva has to give him credit; he didn’t expect him to catch on to that so easily. He exhales, and shrugs. “Well...,” he begins, and stops. You don’t know us, he thinks. We’re different, he thinks. He didn’t apologize, he thinks. I can stop caring, he thinks.
“I was thinking about what you said about Valencia, how it’s harder for you here,” says Gerrard. “Might be assuming here, but it sounds like you were missing people who understood how you felt.” Silva’s eyes trace a couple that came out of one of the deli’s, the man’s arm around the lady’s waist. “You’re not going to get anybody closer to that than me, mate.”
Silva hesitates. Gerrard continues. “Don’t chose anger,” he says, as soft as a gruff voice could get. “Trust me, regret tastes like shit.” Silva doesn’t need him to tell him that; he knew how regret tasted-- like blood on your lips from a kiss; like the scent of an old shirt that you forgot to return and refused to throw out; like paella or fabada or sidra or Spain. “I did. Wasn’t the best idea I had.”
“Thank you,” says Silva, politely. He’s feeling dizzy, looking down from the height of the windows, and is ready to cut the call. There’s a thing such as one phonecall-that-takes-the-wind-out-of-you too many.
“No,” insists Gerrard, a growing urgency in his voice whose roots Silva couldn’t trace. “Listen. Not getting something is a hell of a lot better than losing much, much more.”
“This is no...romantic comedy,” replies Silva, finally, suppressing the fluster in his voice. “Things aren’t so simple as that.”
“That’s exactly why ’m telling you what ‘m telling you,” says Gerrard. Silva falls quiet.
“Thank you,” he says again, but it’s genuine this time. “Bye,” he adds after an uncertain pause, and clicks the phone shut before a reply could filter through the line.
* * *
In this time: they lose to United but he scores, and then he scores again, against Wigan. They reach the semi-finals of the FA cup, but they get knocked out of the Europa league. In this time: Joe takes him to a bar and they almost get caught up the press, and Mancini’s English improves, and they get more sun and less rain. Now: he is lying on his back on the sunsoaked white sheets of the same hotel he’d been at nearly 2 months ago, the TV playing repeats of the clasico on mute in front of him. Now: it’s been almost a year since he last put on a Valencia shirt and played at home, and he still didn’t know quite how he felt.
There’s a sharp knock on his door, and Silva is distracted enough by the comfort of the mattress to cry, “Come in!”
“Do you know how fucking much I hate our fixture schedules?”
Silva bolts upright at the voice, and looks at the door, voice catching in his throat. David Villa’s standing there, but he isn’t smirking, or even angry; his fingers twitch nervously by his side, but his eyes look as they do when you pass to him right in front of the goal.
“What do you want, David?” he says, when he’s unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Villa sits on the edge of his bed, and Silva draws in his legs closer to himself.
“I probably deserve that,” says Villa, staring at him. He stretches, and then opens his mouth, “Our-- our fixture schedules suck.”
There’s probably a frown that’s beginning to form on Silva’s face, because Villa hastily continues, “I’ve-- I’ve wanted to apologize. In person. Since-- you know, since. But, puta madre,” his voice rises, “When I am in London, you are in fucking Greece, and then, when you’re in London, I am in Spain, and I swear, you just went to Kiev, I’m going to Ukraine exactly a month later, and--”
“Villa,” snaps Silva. “Fucking get to the point.”
Villa juts his chin up, and looks him in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
Silva stares at him, and then moves to get up off the bed, “too little, too late,” he murmurs, and almost knocks into David as he blindly attempts to move past him. Villa puts his hands on his shoulder, and his thumbs brush against the blade. Despite himself, Silva looks up at him and meets his eyes.
"I was sorry the second you left that room, and I spent a week being sorry after," says Villa, his expression pained. "I've been trying to call for days, weeks-- or hoping we'd have a coinciding Europe fixture-- fuck, David, I fucked up, I know it, but I didn't know why I did when it's the last thing I wanted to do, okay? I spent time thinking about it. I need you to listen to me." He breathes heavily after that short outburst, and Silva looks him up and down, forcing his face to give away nothing.
“What excuse do you have for yourself?” he says finally, and his voice is as icy as he could hold it, without bursting into a fit of anger that would display a vulnerability he was not willing to show.
“I was...I was having a rough second half, to the season,” begins Villa, “the goal drought--”
“That’s not good enough--” says Silva, not realizing when he had started shouting, pushing at Villa’s chest, only to be tugged back closer again by Villa’s firm grip. “David, let--”
“No, listen, please, let me explain, fuck, please,” says David, urgency lacing his voice, and Silva stops wriggling and considers him. David Villa was not an introspective man, but David Villa was not a natural athlete either-- at least, not at birth; he had kicked and pushed and forced and worked himself to have enough stamina for the game, and he was kicking and pushing and forcing himself to introspect now, because the only thing David Villa was truly a natural at, was being able to do whatever it took to do anything, and that was a blessing and a curse and Silva’s biggest weakness right now.
“Nothing was going right,” he mutters, “The goals didn’t come, the press-- the press said what if Barcelona had made the wrong decision. I was thinking, what if I was the one that did? No-- hear me out-- that’s not an excuse for being a fucking asshole. That’s...”
“David,” says Silva, and his voice has softened, “David, why does everything have to fucking be perfect for you?”
“Because it’s perfect for you!” Silva’s eyes widen, as Villa withdraws his hands from his shoulders, and runs one through his hair, that is flat today, ungelled. “Because you’re fucking...you’re okay. You’re happy, you’re in great form. You’re not--- you can do it, the hiding, the...not being at Valencia, not being...home, okay!”
Silva shakes his head incredulously. David’s voice, still agitated, has lowered to a murmur. “Because it’s too easy for you and too hard for me, and that means you’re going to leave.”
“And you’d rather leave first?” Silva steps forward, and surprises himself and Villa both, when he puts a hand on his cheek. “Vil-- Guaje, look at me. Joder, who do you think you are? I’ve seen characters from bestsellers they sell at airports who are less clichéd than you, idiot.”
Villa’s eyebrows knit together, and he opens his mouth, confused, but Silva’s hand enough by now, and pushes him, pressing their lips together. The back of Villa’s knee clumsily hits one of the beds, and when Silva falls ontop of him, the bone of his knee digs into Villa’s thigh and Villa winces. “Fuck, sorry--”
Villa’s stilled now, adjusted himself so he wasn’t falling off the bed, and he’s back to holding Silva, looking at him. “David,” he begins, with a deep breath, “David, I’m so fucking sorry--” and Silva kisses him before he can continue, till they were both kissing till they were breathless, and entangled with the sheets, and had rolled to the edge of the bed.
“We’re going to fall,” grunts Villa, as one of his legs nearly slips down.
“Ey, Guaje,” Silva whispers back, looking up at him. “We’ll be okay,” he says, and he’s reminded of other times, other lives, other whispers in other hotel rooms, and World Cups and promises, and he thinks of many things, how the sound of rain is different in many cities, and how sometimes kisses and the sea taste the same, and how he doesn’t want to live with regrets when he can live with this instead, and he thinks things can sometimes be better than okay, and then he closes his eyes and stops thinking and starts kissing Villa instead, and this time, they pause for breath, but they don’t stop.
notes:
1. almost all matches mentioned in this fic happened, including club and international fixtures, even the ones that didn't have any dates mentioned or were vague at best. if you're curious at all, ask me! because i'm too lazy to list them all out, haha.
2. club policy during the davids's last few years at valencia seems to have been "tell uncle unai at valencia everything, kids, including your sexuality." :')
3. xabi alonso says he has mild insomnia during match days. i also remember there was a huge fandom trope of him smoking way back in 06-07, and i remember thinking it was based on fact, but i can't find any source now.
4. the second half of dv's first season with barcelona was complete shit. it's okay, he scored against silva's derby rivals in the cl final, which barça won, so both the critics and crackovía learned a lesson.
It happens surprisingly fast. Papers, contracts, agents and the press spin around in his head as he's lacing up to train for the quarters, but in barely two evenings his agent informs him that all he has to do is sign two pieces of paper and it would be done; next season, he'd be wearing sky blue in the grey stadiums of Manchester. It wasn't his first choice (he distinctly remembers Villa raising his eyebrows when he first considered it- but they all didn't have FC Heaven's Own Children chasing them for 40 million euros, did they?), but as he's discussed with his parents and Unai, it wasn't a bad one, either.
Villa took it well, well enough, considering--. He had shrugged when David quietly informed him the deal was done over team dinner, and kissed the dessert off his lips a little harder than usual when they went up to their rooms later. "It's football, no?" he'd gasped between kisses that reeked please-don't-leave-mes and promise-me-it'll-work-outs and other unspoken secrets, and later they'd slept with fingers and limbs entangled, and Silva told himself he was quielty content, because they were going to win the fucking world cup and Manchester isn't as cold as they say, and because Villa valued loyalty with his heart, and he wouldn't leave, he wouldn't.
Later, when they actually did win the fucking World Cup, and after they fuck and drink and dance like idiots through the next few dizzying days, and him and David are lying together in their shared hotel room in some fancy nothing-is-too-good-for-our-champions hotel, drunk enough to talk, but too sober to be tactful, Villa blurts out,
"They won't know there, you know."
David shifts in the white starched sheets uncomfortably, moving to kiss Villa to silence.
"No, I mean," he protests, "Mmm...It's just...I'm used to keeping it a secret around the boys, you know, Xavi and Andres and Carles, you know...and England..."
"Why are you telling me this?" he looks at Villa, propping his head up on his elbows, frowning slightly. "Trying to get me to have second thoughts?"
Villa looks at him like he's been caught out, and David smiles grimly, sadly, his hand slipping tiredly from under him as he slumps lazily on his side.
"My medical is in a few days, Villa. It's happening."
"I'm only pointing out that it won't be easy, it isn't easy, not everybody is like Unai..."
David puts a hand at the back of Villa's neck, pulls him into a deep kiss.
"I'll be okay," he whispers against him, pressing their foreheads together. "We'll be okay," he adds, because Villa looked like he needed to hear that.
Villa falls asleep soon after, snoring in that obnoxious way he always denies doing later, even when Silva laughs and plays him the recording he took on his phone. Silva closes his eyes and wills himself to follow suit, but outside, he can hear the cars honk and faint cries of the Spanish guards petrolling the hotel gates and everything sounds painfully like home, like Unai clapping his back after a bad game and asking him quietly if everything was okay with him and Villa, like the bad jokes Joaquin makes if he misses a cross from Villa at training, "so who's sleeping on the couch tonight?", and he has to force himself not to wonder.
* * *
The boys at Manchester are nice enough. The club was at a strange but not uncomfortable period of its growth; it had an awkward assortment of born and bred English lads, some not prepared for the club's sudden rise in expectations and fame and cautious foreigners, not knowing what to expect from a club that had achieved little thus far but was posied for greatness. It wasn't terribly hard to gel in, however: the british lads, for what all their flaws may be, grinned at David when they passed him in the halls and sometimes yelled unintelligbly at him when he scored in training; David was only a little frustrated that what they spoke honestly sounded like nothing in his Learn-To BBC videos or his tutor from London at all.
He hung with the Spanish speakers out of necessity for a good portion of the first few months- he'd never been the best at picking up languages. Villa had once, on a whim, decided to teach him Asturian; three months later, when he couldn't even remember how to say "I don't speak Asturian" in Asturian and Mata was on the floor after hearing his attempt at it, he'd promptly given up. It didn't matter much anyway: he understood "kick" and "get up" and "give me four laps" and "quit fooling around, Hart" during training, and sometimes he would think it was better this way, especially to feign ignorance when they asked too many questions.
He found it hard to remember how to keep secrets, sometimes. When Macini asked him if he wasn't keeping well after a small dry spell a few months into the season, he had to bite his lip before he could confess that Villa hadn't called in a while, that Messi hugged him a little too much after that match against Osasuna, that his little brother had just failed geometry (alright, the last one, he was sure the mister wouldn't be scandalized to hear, but he was pretty sure Unai Emery was the only coach in the world who demanded such information not be withheld from him, and he was in the habit of sharing these kinds of things, now.) When a couple of lads invited him to a bar to celebrate after a few particularly hard games, and he watched Tevez clumsily dance with some girl, he had to cover up a broken "Weesh Veeyah was heur, no?" with a cough and splutter that nearly caused him to choke on their country's prized english gin and tonic.
"What was that?" yelled Johnson over the loud, grating music, as he offered David a few napkins, helping his wipe the drink off his shirt.
"Weesh my-- my girl-friend was here, no?" he yelled back, because he has a sudden whim to share his loneliness. Villa hadn't called again, and yeah, it was understandable, classico this, training that, but he'd caught a bit of Braveheart on TV last night, and it was raining again, and fish and chips takeaway never quite tasted like home.
"I didn't know you had a girlfriend," Johnson cracked a wide grin, slapping his shoulder. David smiled sheepishly, retiring into his drink and quiet, apologetic privacy. It's clear Johnson wasn't one to give up easily, though, winking at him as he got up to dance with a girl with heavy eye makeup and a rather large necklace and repeatedly asking Silva through the night if he didn't want to dance with some "nice English girl." David rolled his eyes at his unsubtle humour and too loud laugh, but something inside him tugged when he realizes this is the first time he's talked about Villa in months, even if the Villa was a dark haired young spanish girl "from Sevilla," he assured Johnson. "Sex must've been a cracker, if you're doing long distance and all," leered Bridge, who had apparently been listening, poking his head from behind Johnson. David coloured appropriately and Johnson laughed and thumped Bridge's back with a "not everyone's got shagging on the brain all the time like you, mate, not these demure Spanish lads", but inside David's thinking of the last time he kissed Villa and the loneliness sunk in just a little more.
* * *
David gets into a routine as the season yawns lazily into its midway point, though he's not sure if that means he's used to the new circumstances or not. A few months of secrecy, of not waking up to Villa's warm morning breath against his cheek, of constantly making up facts about his "girlfriend" (he'd stopped trying temporarily, though, when he almost fondly described her soulpatch to Johnno), felt like a holiday, a testing but temporary deviation from normality, but with the cold of the winter setting in from September and going strong in late November, soon the grating permancy of it all began to sink in. The days went by fairly quickly, the muddy slide tackles in training and the still-lingering-should-have-died-in-August jokes of "De Jong will kick you in the chest if you don't come with us to the bar tonight, Silva" and the endless mushy peas on the fish and chips, but the weeks themselves drag, and often when David was tieing his shoelaces and looking at the Barcelona calendar that Nando's bought, perhaps purposely, the cheeky teenager he is, for the living room, he's surprised at how little time has passed between the several rapid fire days.
The other boys grow to like him, even the english ones now, who're always tugging him insistently into their karoke nights and celebration parties and poolside lunches with their girlfriends and wives, even if his english is still, as Barry once tactfully put it, "fucking sad." He thinks its because they respect him despite his silence, respect the quiet way he allows his feet to talk for him and swears ferociously on the pitch if any opposition thinks they can take advantage of his size and the way he rolls his eyes with casual indifference at their puns, above them even if he didn't understand them.
"How much would they like you if they you you were a maricon, though?" laughs Villa lazily on the phone, but there's something that sounds more like sadness and apology in his voice than humour.
"Shut up, David," he says, a sudden memory flashing in his mind: summer, cups, Madrid, sheets. Sometimes, it feels like Villa says things nowadays just to provoke him, irritable sparks in their relationship because it's slow, because it's uneasy, because stolen holidays and occasional internationals aren't enough. That night, fittingly enough, he can't sleep again..
"You look like shit," comments Johnno the next morning, as they jog side by side, half of David's face hidden behind a giant muffler to block the cold. David shrugs.
"Broke up with my girlfriend," he explains- he's been meaning to tell them that for a while, the lies too elaborate to elaborate on any further at this point. There's an odd feeling in his stomach, however, at the loss of his fictional girlfriend, much like a stone dropping right through it. Villa's still with you, he reminds himself, but there's that horrible moment when he feels like he's not sure, and another, as horrible one that follows, when he looks behind him to search out Vicente, to talk to him about it, or maybe Unai, and then Mancini calls at them to come to the center and there are no ridiculously huge blow up dummies tripping him over when he turned to look, and he remembered where he was.
* * *
Villa might have been saying it just to piss him off, but David notices things that make him uncomfortable sometimes, little things he'd forgotten to worry about in the last few years at Valencia. There was a time when Bridge had laughed at Hart letting a penalty slip between his fingers in training and told Joe he "played like a fag"; David had felt a strong urge to kick a football at his teeth and tell him, "No, this is how you play like a fag." Even Barry, who David had come to respect, once chuckled at a fanletter an admiring gay fan had sent to him, and people often would beckon Milner to do "that impression of that queer down West street" again, laughter echoing in the locker room. David sometimes wonders idly if this was how they'd laugh at him, if they knew. Maybe there'd be nothing to know, he thinks bitterly to himself, remembering he hadn't spoken to Villa since the hastily day they had spent together during Villa's winter break.
The topic of gay footballers, though, usually never came into the locker room; not that there was time for it between pep talks and crude girlfriend-tit-size compairisons and bad SMS jokes and "who wants to play FIFA at Gary's tonight?"s, which is why David didn't feel particularly bad for eavesdropping when he heard Milner and Barry murmuring to eachother near Milner's lockers after a game.
"No, honest, Johnson let something slip to me and a few guys on the English squad, they've always kind of suspected, you know?"
"Well, fuck me. He's married, mate. And besides, he's a fucking hard lad--"
"I don't know, those Spanish men, apparently, eh?"
"You sure De Jong and Stevie aren't mates?"
Barry pauses and looks at Milner, frowning in confusion. James cracks up, nudging Gary's rib half heartedly.
"Maybe that's why he kicked him, eh?"
Barry rolls his eyes and cuffs Milner's neck amicably. Adam appears out of nowhere between them and David and the noise of the room eventually drowns them out. He sits quietly, fiddling with his already untied shoelaces, his mind piecing together what he just heard. Johnno's sat next to him and is saying something about "good match, eh?" but he can hardly hear him.
It's a crazy idea, to be sure, it's just plain out ridiculous. He isn't even sure if he heard right, if he assumed right- goddamn their accents. But there's something in the abscences at the strange accented english chatters of the locker room and the absence of a warm body pressed against his in relief and triumph, and the absence of the tiny wink one of the other boys would give the two of them. There's something in the absence of hearing a familiar voice say, "good goal, man,", and there's something about his phone screen being blank, no missed calls or messages on its glossy display.
It's a crazy fucking idea. And yet--
"Hey, Pepe? It's Silva here. Mind if I um, if I ask you the phone number of Steven Gerrard?"
* * *
Later, David would wonder what the fuck he was thinking, except the truth was that he wasn't thinking at the time, just nervously clicking through the English language dictionaries and the odd conjugation website on his laptop and tapping his foot impatiently against the floor as the ringing continued against his ear.
"'lo?" comes a gruff voice from the other end.
David nearly drops the phone.
Stevie's first reaction, when David begins to stumble through his story in google-translated English, is to cut the phone and write it off as some sort of bad joke or bad dream. Pepe had told him to expect a call from Silva- and he thinks it's only as a favour to his keeper that he's still hanging on to the line, with this - this kid- who sounded younger than he was in his stumbling insecurities- talking to him about things he wanted to erase, he wanted to forget, the nightmares with sour aftertastes. There's something in him that pushes him to deny everything, to tell this lost sounding boy at the other end of the line that he was crazy, that he must have misheard - whoever he heard the rumours from, fuck, he’d have to look into that later, was it that obvious? - but then there's also something in Silva's soft voice, the way the Spanish rubs against the broken English, the way his half sentences hang heavy with hard questions, the way he-
Stevie recognizes the loneliness.
"So..." says Silva, haltingly, "So...is my story. So, is true? You and...you and Xabi? Porq--because...you know... because."
He says Shahhbee with that perfect Spanish curl around the Shhs and Rrs that Xabi tried to teach Stevie on lazy nights in Champions-league-city-hotels, in the way Stevie has never been able to master. Stevie thinks of how they've left, all of them, Fernando and Masche and Xabi and the We've got the best midfield in the whole worlds and the season and Roy and he sighs heavily, nodding.
"Yeah," he grunts. "Yeah it's...yeah."
There's a pause. Then, Silva speaks softly.
"So...but...you're over him now? Because of...of distance, si? You are...you are happy..more happy now?"
There's something that sounds a lot like a plea in his voice. Stevie pictures Istanbul, kisses, stars, trophies, injuries, insecurities, Roy, flight tickets, 0-0s and 'you have (0) unread messages's. He pictures matches, and accents, and fights and 'why the fuck are you leaving's and 'it's not about you, you know that, no?'s and he closes his eyes.
"Yes." he says, flatly. "Yes, I'm over him.”
* * *
January is cold.
When Silva recounts this observation to his brother, Nando rolls his eyes and and thanks him, Captain Obvious, but that’s not what Silva meant; January is cold: cold in a way that’s biting and unforgiving and bitter coffee on Sunday mornings that’s too hot against the sharp chill; cold in a way that’s ice dangling off tall gates and frozen dew; cold in a way that he’s out of his last tin of imported Cola Cao; cold in a way that’s the fact that Villa still hasn’t called after his break, and he knows they just lost to Betis and he needs time, but perhaps January is cold in a way that’s that Silva is running out of time to give.
They lose, a few days later, to Villa. Silva calls it Aston Veeyah later but nobody laughs, and Johnno only claps his back in silence before he gathers his clothes and leaves for the showers. The locker room isn’t depressed, and there’s no reason it should be-they were still sitting comfortably at a more comfortable third than Valencia had accomplished in a while, but it was as somber as was appropriate after a loss, and David sighs to the silence when he kicks off his boots and a sock. He tips his head back against the wall as he swings his half-socked feet in and out from under his seat. He looks at his phone out of habit now, but he doesn’t expect anything, staring blankly at the glossy screen. He considers throwing it against the opposite locker and watching the pieces of glass crunch and shatter, inviting whoever was left in the fucking room to look up and start because this was just one of the many fucking secrets they didn’t know about David Silva. His knuckles clench and whiten around the thin body of the phone until he thinks it would leave marks, red indicators of pressure it was cutting against his palm.
He puts it in his pocket instead.
That night, Pepe calls. Seeing the name on the screen, Silva is briefly discomfited, after he is briefly disturbed and briefly annoyed by the shrill of his old “We are the Champions” ring tone cutting through his shallow sleep at 3 a.m. He bites his lip as his fingers toy at the edge of the phone, debating with himself. He feels a small bubble of nervousness in his belly, and hovers over the “reject call” button. It would be easy not to answer, to pretend the phone hadn’t woken him up-to avoid Pepe for weeks till the phonecall with Gerrard blows over-but instead, he finds himself sliding a thumb across the screen and letting out an awkward greeting. “Hello?”
“Hola, poni.” There’s a pause, and rustling, fidgeting. “Sorry about your game, hombre.”
Silva lets out a breath, and doesn’t ask, you called in the middle of the night to tell me this?. “Yeah,” he says cautiously instead, “We’ll live, it’s…it’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Pepe laughs, forced. “You’re doing so well, no? Better than us.”
Silva doesn’t reply to that, and the conversation dies into the silence of their breathing and the soft rain outside. He opens his mouth. He wants to point out that this pretense was stupid, that they both knew he wasn’t talking calling at 3 a.m. to talk football (he isn’t Xavi, for fuck’s sake), that they should just get this over with because this awfully familiar twist of worry is beginning to cramp David’s stomach. He opens his mouth, and Pepe says,
“Silva. I talked, I talked to Stevie.”
Outside, there is a distant low hum of jazz that accompanies the drizzle, from a club right next to the hotel in London they were staying at.
“Silva,” Pepe continues, voice uncertain, when David doesn’t reply, “Enano, eh…there’s something I want you to know about...about him, Stevie.”
Silva isn’t sure what to say to that. His clutch on the phone tightened, and he leans against the headboard, eyes closed and head full of whispers that he hadn’t let himself hear in a while: does he know? does he know? It was strange, because he had been hiding for so long in Manchester that he had become used to it again, used to easy lies rolling off his lips, aided by the convenient ability to feign mistranslation and a lack of understanding of a foreign language -- but getting caught in Manchester was never a fear the way it had always been in Spain: Villa was too far away and Silva still dreamt in Spanish. Somewhere, in the two thousand one hundred and ninety six kilometers that separated Valencia and Manchester, he had forgotten what it meant to keep secrets.
Now that Pepe was on the edge of knowing, Silva felt sick in a way he had no idea how to handle.
“Pepe,” he says, and his voice is suddenly urgent, “Pepe, I can explain-”
“Poni, hear me out. Stevie gets, he’s a little…quick with his words sometimes, says things he doesn’t mean. Don’t-don’t take Stevie at first glance, okay?”
It was the slowing down of Silva’s heartbeat that allowed him to realize that it had sped in the first place. “What?” he says with a frown, eyebrows knitting together, “Pepe-,”
“No, no, listen, escuchame, por favor. Talk to Stevie again, okay? Or don’t, but-don’t believe everything he says in one go.”
Silva’s tension is slowly knitting into confusion, as he draws his knees to his chin. “Pepe, what-,”
“Give him a second chance,” Pepe rushes out.
“Maybe,” says Silva, after a long silence, fingers picking at the isolated little threads feebly poking out of his covers. “Maybe.”
He can hear Pepe exhale, the air pushed out against the mouthpiece, and he refuses to wonder who they both were really talking about. That night, he sleeps uneasily, thinking about secrets and magazine covers and goal celebrations and blackmail and best friends and spies.
* * *
The night of February the 6th, when 23 English players board a flight to Cophenhagen, Stevie gets on a plane to Madrid.
When he steps out of the airport, it is 11:00 p.m., and it is dark. Stevie frowns into low, blue glow of the moon, and hails a taxi, adjusting his dark glasses and looking around furtively for lurking photographers and journalsits. As he shuts the door of the little cab, the driver asks him, “Adonde, señor?” and it is then he realizes that even if he did how to answer that, he would not know how to express it well enough. He stays silent, and the driver repeats his question, impatience lacing his voice.
“Uh...a moment, un momento,” says Stevie, cursing his awkward accent and fishing out his phone. “Pepe,” he says, when a sleepy voice answers with a curse, “Pepe, don’t say anything, you smug bastard, -- un bloody momento, mate-- just..I’ve got a lad here driving me taxi, I need you to give him an address in Madrid, okay? I never got it written down---”
He hands the phone to the bemused driver, and then sits back in his seat, fingers uselessly scratching against the leather, tiredness and sunglasses making the view at the borders of Bajaras a dark and indistinct blur, tuning out the rapid Spanish that is being fired in the front seat. He’s half asleep when the taxi screeches to an apologetic halt, and awakens with a start, rubbing his eyes. “Ch--Gracias,” he nods at the driver, and shoves a few euros into his hands. Standing in front of the tall, white house, he by old impulse looks behind him. The taxi has driven away. He rings the bell.
“It’s Stevie,” is all he says, when a wary voice says something in Spanish through the intercom. There’s a pause, a lengthy one, and then, finally: “Wait. I’ll just be out.” Stevie doesn’t say anything, only wraps his arms together and leans against the gate, breathing in the cold.
Xabi opens the gate in his loose shorts and a sweater without a shirt underneath, and there’s something startlingly intimate about seeing him like that, not put together, not in a kit, either, an intimacy Stevie has forgotten how to wear. He looks wide awake, though tired, and he looks at Stevie with a mild curiosity that’s more careful than genuine. “Stevie?” he says, and Stevie’s hand rubs the back of his neck nervously. “What are you doing here?”
“Got meself out of international duty,” mumbles Stevie, and at the very least, it’s the start of the truth. “Thought I’d drop by, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Almost two years,” says Xabi. Someone had to say it, better sooner than later.
“Yeah,” Stevie clears his throat, “Like I said. A while.”
Xabi opens his mouth. Xabi does not say, you come in here after so long and expect me to just let you back in? Xabi does not say, I know we fought, but I thought you said you would call. Xabi does not say, telling the press you’re “devastated” is not what I wanted from you. Xabi does not say, but someday, we all had to go back home. Xabi says, “what do you want?” and Stevie doesn’t say many things, but Stevie says, “A drive.”
Xabi runs a hand through his hair. It’s the same, everything about him is the same, except the stubble, maybe, even the way he frowns and the calmness in his tone and the deepness of his voice. “Nagore will wonder,” he says, and then a second later, “Let me change.”
“Don’t,” Stevie says suddenly, reaching out and wrapping a hand around his wrist when the other man turns away. The contact singes both their skins, even though it’s two degrees outside and the chill bit. Stevie lets go uncertainly, and shrugs, “What you’re wearing is fine.” Xabi stares at him like he’s insane, and Xabi’s ability to pack condescension into a gaze should never be underestimated, but Stevie just stares back at him and Xabi finally concedes, and shrugs. “This way,” he says, and motions towards the garage.
They ride for almost an hour, and they ride in what transforms from a deeply uncomfortable silence to a comfortably sparse conversation, with sign-posts and orange brick houses and small memories rolling behind them, only speaking occasionally about which turn to take, or congratulating each other for their last results (both wins) or Xabi giving a small laugh when Stevie’s forehead wrinkles and he attempts to pronounce the street names.
“So, that Fernando drama,” Xabi says, at one point.
“People leave,” Stevie replies.
“Didn’t sleep after the match, then?” Stevie asks Xabi, at another point.
“You know my post-match insomnia,” smiles Xabi ruefully, and there’s something that links the curl of his lips straight to Stevie’s voice, which catches.
“Yeah,” he tears his gaze away from his smile, looking back out at the road, “Yeah, I do.”
“Reading again, then?” Stevie says, after a while. “Some Spanish book?”
“The Royal Game,” he smiles.
“A book about cricket?” Stevie feigns horror.
Xabi throws his head back and laughs, and it’s a wonderful sound. “Chess,” he says, and Stevie grins knowingly at that, you-would dancing at the edge of the curve of his lips.
They’re at the edge of the city when Xabi stops, and they both get out into the empty road and the silence, stepping in front of the car. Xabi elegantly perches himself on the bonnet of the car, and Stevie leans far back enough on it for his body to be somewhat aligned to him, although they don’t touch. Xabi pulls out a cigarette packet from his pocket, and a lighter.
“I thought you quit,” says Stevie, nose wrinkling. Xabi shrugs. “Only once in a while, and it’s cold tonight,” he says. Only when I’m nervous.
“So,” Stevie stretches comfortably against the metal, “Tell me more about the chess book of yours. Didn’t know you played, really, though I should have suspected.”
Xabi expells smoke from between his lips, and then looks at him, taking a deep breath. “Why are you here, Stevie?”
Stevie pauses, and then tugs himself up on the bonnet. Before Xabi could say anything, he kisses him on the lips, tasting cold tobacco and warm familiarity, and one, two beats later, Xabi responds, a moan muffled against his mouth and a hand-- and it’s startling how muscle memory can extend to the feel of a grip or a mental map of another’s body in the tip of your fingers-- and for a long time, they don’t stop.
“Stevie,” Xabi whispers, when they break off, his breath ragged, his cigarette fallen to the ground, still glowing faintly in the moonlight, his hands on Stevie’s chest, in a move to push him away. “Stevie,” he clears his throat so his voice could stronger, and says, “Stevie, you can’t just come in here, and expect everything to be the same, you can’t just--”
Stevie looks Xabi right in the eye, and there’s a certainty in them that Xabi’s forgotten, because he hasn’t seen it in two years, three years, a certainty that faded away with fights and transfers and their relationship. “Xabi, I’m sorry,” and it’s more than Xabi wanted to hear two years ago, and less than what Xabi had expected now, but it still doesn't feel enough.
“You want us to pick up where we left off?” says Xabi, finally.
“No,” Stevie shakes his head, “We didn’t leave off in a good place. I want to--,” he looks at Xabi in the eye again, and his hands are perfectly still, on Xabi’s shoulders, against the worn sweater. “I want to start over, Xabi.”
“So you can remember why you stopped?” Xabi’s voice is soft.
“I remember why I stopped,” says Stevie steadily. “I was scared.”
Xabi’s fists curl around the material of Stevie’s jumper. “And now?”
“Now everything I was scared of has already happened,” Stevie inhales deeply. “Now I have nothing to lose.”
* * *
Stepping back into Spain is never the ceremony that Silva expects it to be.
It’s different, of course it is; the streets are warmer and drier, even in February’s cold, and the sun rays honey the pavement, and there’s rumbles and whispers in Spanish all around, and everything is coloured different: brighter, more curious, more like home. But it’s never the great moment of homecoming that he always expect: there’s no sharp shock of contrast, or incisive pang of nostalgia, only the distant sound of music that filters from shop-radios and the freshly painted graffiti on the wall, and the feeling that he had never left, even if Spain had left him.
The atmosphere when the national team reunites is rarely sombre, but it’s a lazy winter afternoon and every one’s still in club-mode, so the Madridistas and Culés stick to different tables at dinner, and different sections of the hotel after. He had ended up rooming with Marche, as always, who talked to him in his deep, quiet way about Villareal and Valencia, about moving, about Emery, and Valenciano paellas, and bats and vultures, and it calmed him to just sit back and listen, not think for a while, toying with the remote control as his feet dangled off the edge of the bed opposite Carlos’s.
Inevitably, however, Marche asks him about Villa, and Silva has to bite his lip. “We met,” he says, and they had. It had been an awkward greeting, because Villa had been surrounded by his team-mates in the lobby, throwing his head back and laughing at something Xavi or Pique had been saying. When their eyes had met, they had given each other tentative and awkward smiles; yet they hugged warmly enough, inhaling the familiar warmth of each other’s bodies, and faded smell of freshly washed team shirts. David had, however, felt every muscle of Villa’s tense under the gazes of the blaugranas that observed them, letting his grip slacken around the other man, in a calculated imitation of being platonic.
“Talk tonight?” Villa had gruffly clapped his shoulder. “Post dinner?”
“I need to sleep early,” Silva had replied. “Game.”
“That’s it?” Marche asks.
“That’s it,” Silva replies, flopping on his stomach, feeling the cool side of the pillow calm his flushed face. He breathes in the scent of starch and lemon freshener, silent and still until he hears Marche click the lights off, and shuffle his feet off the floor and into bed.
He doesn’t start the game the next day, and after the World Cup, he’s really not surprised. He sits on the bench squeezed between Llorente and Marche, trying to maintain as much of a distance as he could from Pepe, not wanting a repeat of that cryptic conversation on the phone. He watches the match dully, picturing the last time he had played at the Bernabeu. It was almost a year ago, he realized, and it simultaneously felt so distant and so close. He watches Villa’s face screw up in frustration as a pass he serves Pedro skims off the goalie’s hand: he had less lines on his face, then, less stubble, that day, but no less frustration. Villa had fucked him later in the showers, and he had whimpered and bitten his own forearm in a bid to stay as quiet as he could, attuned to any surrounding sounds even though it was “just Valencia”; later, they had watched old soaps until 2 a.m. on their room’s clunky television set, fingers intertwined between their tired bodies.
Llorente makes a sudden noise beside him, and Silva is jolted back into attention, just in time to see Villa miss horrifically, letting a shot he could have easily edged diagonally past the line just brush off the side post. “Puta madre,” hisses Llorente, “That could have been the one that bet Raúl’s record.” Silva stares blankly at the ball, as it soars its way into the Spanish half. He had forgotten Villa was at the cusp of that historical record, even if he could never forget how much that would mean to Villa. He eyes him on the pitch, a figure in sweat-soaked blue, running with slumped shoulders back to the halfway line, a frown souring his face.
One of the trainers calls him when the game is in its last ten minutes, and he’s beckoned on the field. Villa’s jogging towards him, not looking too pleased, although he does break into a rueful half-smile as he reaches the edge of the pitch. He ruffles his hair, and mutters, “Go get them, poni,” and Silva meets his eyes for a brief second before he runs on to the grass, nodding at Andrés as the ball hits his feet.
“Great goal,” Villa says to him later, and it sounds a lot like “how ironic,” but in a way that’s more sad than bitter, resignation weighing the shoulders he rolled back in a stretch, as he tugs a shirt out of his locker. Silva shrugs, rolling down his socks and muttering, “It should have been you.”
Villa slams his locker shut, and wipes the sweat off his pale chest with his bunched up shirt. “I was shit,” he replies finally, with characteristic brutal honesty. “Nothing new there,” he adds, and now the bitterness crept into his voice, close to being palpable. Silva gives him a look that’s half upset and half exasperated, but it’s a bad time, because Villa snaps, as he folds the towel irately around himself, “Oh, sorry, for bringing it up, I forgot you didn’t care.”
“What the--” begins Silva heatedly, temper flaring, and then looks around, as though remembering where they were. But the locker room was empty; the two of them were used to lingering when they shared one, pretending to take longer with their clothes-- and they had done so again, by sheer force of habit. “--fuck, what the fuck, Villa,” he continues, voice dropping to a hiss, “Don’t take this match out on me, it’s only a friendly anyway, fuck.”
“It’s not just about the--” Villa rolls his head back, sighing, “Fuck it.” They stand in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, each half dressed, Villa’s hands folded across his chest.
“David,” Silva tries finally, because someone had to. Villa looks at him warily, and he looks like he’s aged the year that stretched between them, and Silva swallows down the guilt and the anger alike, putting his hands on David’s shoulders, feeling the shock of familiarity as his fingers pressed Villa’s bare, sweaty skin. “David,” he tries again, and suddenly they’re kissing, Villa tugging him backwards as his back presses against the wall. Silva makes a noise against his Villa’s lips, one that is protesting and demanding more and angry and desperate all at once, and his teeth catch at Villa’s lower lip, feeling iron and sweat and nostalgia and need against his tongue. He sobs into the kiss, because it’s too much and too sudden and painfully, obviously not enough, all at once. His hand fists into Villa’s hair, and Villa breathes raggedly when their break apart, and Silva stares at him.
“Why didn’t you call?”
Villa’s fingers are against his lower back, his fingertips marking pressure points on Silva’s skin. He shakes his head.
“I’m sor--,” he begins, then stops, as though that wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. “I was having--”
“Joder,” cries Silva, because it’s been boiling inside him for too long, and because none of the beginnings of Villa’s sentences sounded like they would have endings he would have liked. “Joder, David, why didn’t you just call?” His fingers are digging sharply enough into Villa’s shoulders to leave marks, marks Villa never allowed him to leave, because he was always somebody else’s, Barca’s, Pati’s, his ambition’s. Silva feels himself shaking, and Villa has a glistening red streak of blood in the middle of his lower lip. “You fucking selfish bastard, I--”
“Telephone lines work two ways, Silva,” bites Villa suddenly in response, and Silva knows he had prodded the edge of the apology too long, allowing it to twist into anger. He stares into Villa’s intense, angry brown eyes, trying to read them. He has just opened his mouth to respond, when suddenly, they both hear a creak of the door and spring apart so fast that Silva trips and his shin hits the edge of the bench below their lockers, wincing in pain. Xabi walks in, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” he says, after a pause. His eyes look tired, like he had not slept in a few days, though they were bright. “I forgot my phone here.” Silva is still rubbing his shin, and it feels like Villa beside him had stopped breathing entirely. He watches Xabi with the corner of his eye, as the other man picks up a Blackberry from off the opposite bench and tucks into his pocket.
“See you,” he says, as Xabi leaves through the door, and Villa grunts something, too.
“Thanks,” he frowns, after the door closes, indicating at the bruise on his shin. Villa ignores him, still staring after Xabi, groaning when the other man shut the door, his knees giving way as he slumps to the floor.
“That was close,” he breathes, pressing his palms to his face. He sits like that for a long time, silent, Silva too, rubbing his face with his hands. “I told you the hiding would get to us,” he says finally, looking up at Silva.
“You said the hiding would get to me,” Silva points out acidly, folding his arms.
“And now I realize that we are not in Valencia anymore, Silva,” Villa closes his eyes. “Things are different now. Fuck, it’s just-- there’s nowhere we can just-- and having to hide constantly, it’s fucking hard. You’re fighting about a phone call in a month? There are bigger things going on here.”
“Don’t condescend to me,” it’s Silva’s turn to snap. “You think I’m not feeling that? You think I don’t realize that? Pepe called me the other day. About us”
Villa’s eyebrows fly into his hair. He opens his mouth, but Silva cuts him off.
“Don’t waste your breath asking if he knows, because that’s not the fucking point.” He rubs the back of his neck furiously with his hand, feeling the flesh burn under his palm. “The point is, he was asking, and-- I felt like I was going to throw up, I was so fucking scared-- and I realized that that was the first time in months I had felt that way, felt legitimately afraid of someone finding us out.”
“So?” says Villa, and it sounds like a challenge. Silva looks down at him, and he shakes his head.
“So the point is that Valencia didn’t make us fall in...in love, Villa! They let us be...in love, but they didn’t-- and wherever we are now, Barcelona, City-- they’re not making us go off each other like this, either!” Silva exhales, his face flushed, heated, running a hand through his hair. “We were fucking broken weeks before I felt fucking scared of being found out, Villa,” he presses the heel of his palm to his throbbing temple, “Let’s not ignore the facts.”
Villa narrows his eyes at him. Silva makes a noise in his throat, and slips on the cotton shirt he’d pulled out from his bag, wishing his face would cool down, his body stop feeling like it was trembling, not wanting to stay a minute longer in the showers. He turns on his heel, making for the door, when he hears a shuffle beside him, as though Villa had moved to get off the floor.
He pauses, then twists the knob of the door anyway. “It’s not the hiding that’s wearing me down, Guaje,” he murmurs, and the old nickname that slips from his lips startles him. He had been audible enough for David to hear, judging by the pause in his shuffling. “It’s you,” he finishes, as he pushes open the door.
* * *
There are things you can get used to, Silva thinks, lying back on the grass after training’s ended, a few of the boys sitting a few feet away, Johnno, he thinks, and Shaun and maybe Hart, their loud voices and louder accents carrying across the vast expanse of the training ground. You can get used to the acidity of the tartar sauce on fish and chips, the oil dripping off between your fingers. You can get used to the squeak of sole to mud, when it rains, and you can get used to the colouring of the sky. You can get used to forcing a foreign language through your lips; you can get too used to it to have to blush when the words knot your tongue, again.
You can definitely get used to goals, and victories, and awards, and fans pumping their fists in the air, and Merlin! Merlin! Merlin!, and hard kicks to the shin, and english swearwords, and to stepping on the pitch and feeling like you’re the center of the team, feeling like you’re pulling strings and goals and hearts with your kicks, feeling like every thing’s changed, but every thing is okay.
You can get used to ignoring calls on the phone. You can get so used to it, your fingers automatically fly to the red “disconnect” button when you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket; and later, you can get used to looking at the blankness of your phone screen, looking at the “(0) missed calls.” You can get used to tabloids. You can get used to tea.
You can get used to being okay, Silva thinks, driving back home through the thinning traffic on the evening roads. You can get used to this, he thinks, sitting at the window of his bedroom, looking at the neon lights of the still-open take-outs from across the road.
When the phone rings, he jumps, and a bubble of hope that he later feels guilty about swells inside him. But it’s not Villa on the phone, it’s an unknown number from out of town. Silva frowns, but he’s curious enough to pick it up, and a vaguely familiar voice filters through.
“‘Lo?”
This time, Silva does not nearly drop the phone. This time, Silva asks, “Gerrard?” because he had deleted the number off his phone.
“Eh...yeah, mate, it’s me.” There’s rustling on his end. Silva’s has a sinking feeling already about this; he wasn’t ready for another phone conversation about something he didn’t want to discuss with someone who knew much more than he was comfortable with, anyway.
“Gerrard,” he says into the phone, hesitantly, “Yes? Anything I can do for you?”
“I want to uh, talk,” comes the thick accent in reply, “About what we...talked about earlier.”
Talking to Gerrard seems harder this time, even excluding the gap they had in communicaton; it seems like pulling teeth to get the other man to come to his point, and Silva realizes that the other call was only easier because he was doing most of the talking.
“I’m happy for you, Gerrard,” says Silva politely, when he’s done digesting whatever scraps of English he could ingest from what Gerrard had been telling him. “Xabi looks happy. Say to him I say congratulations.”
“That’s not my point, mate,” sighs Gerrard on the other end. “My point is that...you shouldn’t do what I did. And I feel like I made you, you know, with me advice to you the last time. You...you got me thinking, mate. I need to return the favour.”
Silva pauses, drawing his knees to his chest. “Okay,” he says finally, simply, because his vocabulary was too limited for the complicated thoughts swimming in his head.
“You think it’s not my place to give advice,” comes Gerrard’s voice in reply. Silva has to give him credit; he didn’t expect him to catch on to that so easily. He exhales, and shrugs. “Well...,” he begins, and stops. You don’t know us, he thinks. We’re different, he thinks. He didn’t apologize, he thinks. I can stop caring, he thinks.
“I was thinking about what you said about Valencia, how it’s harder for you here,” says Gerrard. “Might be assuming here, but it sounds like you were missing people who understood how you felt.” Silva’s eyes trace a couple that came out of one of the deli’s, the man’s arm around the lady’s waist. “You’re not going to get anybody closer to that than me, mate.”
Silva hesitates. Gerrard continues. “Don’t chose anger,” he says, as soft as a gruff voice could get. “Trust me, regret tastes like shit.” Silva doesn’t need him to tell him that; he knew how regret tasted-- like blood on your lips from a kiss; like the scent of an old shirt that you forgot to return and refused to throw out; like paella or fabada or sidra or Spain. “I did. Wasn’t the best idea I had.”
“Thank you,” says Silva, politely. He’s feeling dizzy, looking down from the height of the windows, and is ready to cut the call. There’s a thing such as one phonecall-that-takes-the-wind-out-of-you too many.
“No,” insists Gerrard, a growing urgency in his voice whose roots Silva couldn’t trace. “Listen. Not getting something is a hell of a lot better than losing much, much more.”
“This is no...romantic comedy,” replies Silva, finally, suppressing the fluster in his voice. “Things aren’t so simple as that.”
“That’s exactly why ’m telling you what ‘m telling you,” says Gerrard. Silva falls quiet.
“Thank you,” he says again, but it’s genuine this time. “Bye,” he adds after an uncertain pause, and clicks the phone shut before a reply could filter through the line.
* * *
In this time: they lose to United but he scores, and then he scores again, against Wigan. They reach the semi-finals of the FA cup, but they get knocked out of the Europa league. In this time: Joe takes him to a bar and they almost get caught up the press, and Mancini’s English improves, and they get more sun and less rain. Now: he is lying on his back on the sunsoaked white sheets of the same hotel he’d been at nearly 2 months ago, the TV playing repeats of the clasico on mute in front of him. Now: it’s been almost a year since he last put on a Valencia shirt and played at home, and he still didn’t know quite how he felt.
There’s a sharp knock on his door, and Silva is distracted enough by the comfort of the mattress to cry, “Come in!”
“Do you know how fucking much I hate our fixture schedules?”
Silva bolts upright at the voice, and looks at the door, voice catching in his throat. David Villa’s standing there, but he isn’t smirking, or even angry; his fingers twitch nervously by his side, but his eyes look as they do when you pass to him right in front of the goal.
“What do you want, David?” he says, when he’s unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Villa sits on the edge of his bed, and Silva draws in his legs closer to himself.
“I probably deserve that,” says Villa, staring at him. He stretches, and then opens his mouth, “Our-- our fixture schedules suck.”
There’s probably a frown that’s beginning to form on Silva’s face, because Villa hastily continues, “I’ve-- I’ve wanted to apologize. In person. Since-- you know, since. But, puta madre,” his voice rises, “When I am in London, you are in fucking Greece, and then, when you’re in London, I am in Spain, and I swear, you just went to Kiev, I’m going to Ukraine exactly a month later, and--”
“Villa,” snaps Silva. “Fucking get to the point.”
Villa juts his chin up, and looks him in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
Silva stares at him, and then moves to get up off the bed, “too little, too late,” he murmurs, and almost knocks into David as he blindly attempts to move past him. Villa puts his hands on his shoulder, and his thumbs brush against the blade. Despite himself, Silva looks up at him and meets his eyes.
"I was sorry the second you left that room, and I spent a week being sorry after," says Villa, his expression pained. "I've been trying to call for days, weeks-- or hoping we'd have a coinciding Europe fixture-- fuck, David, I fucked up, I know it, but I didn't know why I did when it's the last thing I wanted to do, okay? I spent time thinking about it. I need you to listen to me." He breathes heavily after that short outburst, and Silva looks him up and down, forcing his face to give away nothing.
“What excuse do you have for yourself?” he says finally, and his voice is as icy as he could hold it, without bursting into a fit of anger that would display a vulnerability he was not willing to show.
“I was...I was having a rough second half, to the season,” begins Villa, “the goal drought--”
“That’s not good enough--” says Silva, not realizing when he had started shouting, pushing at Villa’s chest, only to be tugged back closer again by Villa’s firm grip. “David, let--”
“No, listen, please, let me explain, fuck, please,” says David, urgency lacing his voice, and Silva stops wriggling and considers him. David Villa was not an introspective man, but David Villa was not a natural athlete either-- at least, not at birth; he had kicked and pushed and forced and worked himself to have enough stamina for the game, and he was kicking and pushing and forcing himself to introspect now, because the only thing David Villa was truly a natural at, was being able to do whatever it took to do anything, and that was a blessing and a curse and Silva’s biggest weakness right now.
“Nothing was going right,” he mutters, “The goals didn’t come, the press-- the press said what if Barcelona had made the wrong decision. I was thinking, what if I was the one that did? No-- hear me out-- that’s not an excuse for being a fucking asshole. That’s...”
“David,” says Silva, and his voice has softened, “David, why does everything have to fucking be perfect for you?”
“Because it’s perfect for you!” Silva’s eyes widen, as Villa withdraws his hands from his shoulders, and runs one through his hair, that is flat today, ungelled. “Because you’re fucking...you’re okay. You’re happy, you’re in great form. You’re not--- you can do it, the hiding, the...not being at Valencia, not being...home, okay!”
Silva shakes his head incredulously. David’s voice, still agitated, has lowered to a murmur. “Because it’s too easy for you and too hard for me, and that means you’re going to leave.”
“And you’d rather leave first?” Silva steps forward, and surprises himself and Villa both, when he puts a hand on his cheek. “Vil-- Guaje, look at me. Joder, who do you think you are? I’ve seen characters from bestsellers they sell at airports who are less clichéd than you, idiot.”
Villa’s eyebrows knit together, and he opens his mouth, confused, but Silva’s hand enough by now, and pushes him, pressing their lips together. The back of Villa’s knee clumsily hits one of the beds, and when Silva falls ontop of him, the bone of his knee digs into Villa’s thigh and Villa winces. “Fuck, sorry--”
Villa’s stilled now, adjusted himself so he wasn’t falling off the bed, and he’s back to holding Silva, looking at him. “David,” he begins, with a deep breath, “David, I’m so fucking sorry--” and Silva kisses him before he can continue, till they were both kissing till they were breathless, and entangled with the sheets, and had rolled to the edge of the bed.
“We’re going to fall,” grunts Villa, as one of his legs nearly slips down.
“Ey, Guaje,” Silva whispers back, looking up at him. “We’ll be okay,” he says, and he’s reminded of other times, other lives, other whispers in other hotel rooms, and World Cups and promises, and he thinks of many things, how the sound of rain is different in many cities, and how sometimes kisses and the sea taste the same, and how he doesn’t want to live with regrets when he can live with this instead, and he thinks things can sometimes be better than okay, and then he closes his eyes and stops thinking and starts kissing Villa instead, and this time, they pause for breath, but they don’t stop.
notes:
1. almost all matches mentioned in this fic happened, including club and international fixtures, even the ones that didn't have any dates mentioned or were vague at best. if you're curious at all, ask me! because i'm too lazy to list them all out, haha.
2. club policy during the davids's last few years at valencia seems to have been "tell uncle unai at valencia everything, kids, including your sexuality." :')
3. xabi alonso says he has mild insomnia during match days. i also remember there was a huge fandom trope of him smoking way back in 06-07, and i remember thinking it was based on fact, but i can't find any source now.
4. the second half of dv's first season with barcelona was complete shit. it's okay, he scored against silva's derby rivals in the cl final, which barça won, so both the critics and crackovía learned a lesson.
