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Neymar remembers the first time he sees Lionel Messi. There’s a football game playing on their tiny TV and he’s sitting there watching with his dad, wishing that he could be outside actually playing football with his friends.
“Imagine that, being seventeen and playing for Barcelona, look Juninho, that could be you one day you know,” his dad says and Neymar scowls, kicking out his feet. Whatever, he thinks. At that age his whole world is barely bigger than the city he lives in, he can’t imagine a stadium bigger than Vila Belmiro, a team bigger than Santos. Barcelona is so far away it might as well be a fairy-tale to scare children into training harder.
But he begrudgingly lifts his head anyways and what he sees on that grainy screen makes all the hair on his body rise. He’s twelve years old and something seems to bury itself in his chest as he watches a boy dribble his way down the pitch like the laws of physics don’t quite apply to him the same way as they do to everyone else. Neymar has watched Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Kaka, but this boy is something different, something out of this world, inhuman.
“Who is that? Pai, who is that?” he babbles, pulling at his dad’s sleeve and pointing at the screen.
“Lionel Messi, he’s a talent, isn’t he? In the future, Juninho, you may play against him,” and his dad carries on talking, but Neymar doesn’t hear a word.
He barely blinks, eyes burning as he stares at the screen, anything for another glimpse. He can’t look away until the match ends, he feels like there’s a knife blade against the skin of his eyelids. When his dad shuts off the tv he shudders, whole body and aching, as if someone has just dunked him head first into a cold bucket of water. He doesn’t stop thinking about Lionel Messi for years after that.
There’s no arguing that Messi is captivating, that Neymar doesn’t think anyone would disagree with. He’s not necessarily handsome, not in the classic sense, but Neymar can’t keep his eyes off of him, especially not when he has a ball at his feet. But the strong line of his nose, deep furrow of his brow, the dark of his eyes like the winter sky just before dawn, cold enough to make a corpse shiver. There’s just something about him that draws your eyes to him, something almost inhuman.
The first time they meet it’s just a moment before a Brazil and Argentina friendly, one that Neymar definitely hasn’t been counting down the days and minutes to. ‘Don’t be so nervous, we’re going to beat those putas’ one of his teammates tells him as they line up in the tunnel, but Neymar can barely hear anything apart from swelling static and the crowd, noise rising like an ocean tide. He sees Lionel Messi as the Argentine team come to shake hands, short and hunched and so breath-taking Neymar feels his lungs contract.
Their hands touch, Messi looks at him with dark eyes, and it’s as if all the atoms in Neymar’s body shift one space to the left. In that one instant Messi has left him shudderingly out of place in the world. He doesn’t remember a single thing from the rest of the match, but when he gets home his right hand burns like he’s been branded, tiny blisters mark the outline of where Messi’s fingers touched his skin and he trembles staring at them. He picks at them just to make sure they’re real, the scars never quite fade.
When Neymar joins Barcelona so many years later it’s like there’s something pulling him there, a thread pulled tight and choking around his heart, more like a compulsion than a choice. It doesn’t matter how much money Real Madrid offers, Barcelona calls to him like a car headlight to a deer, he can’t move, he has to feel its metal crumpled into his skin.
He stares at himself in the mirror, the shirt looks foreign on him. Blue as the vein, red as the blood that spills out of it, there’s something hungry about the way the badge feels over his chest. Barcelona, when he closes his eyes he remembers being twelve again and feeling like this place was just a myth. He supposes he’s become one of those beasts of legend now.
He thinks about the fact that Messi is here too, the fact that this club is his home, that he belongs here more than Neymar could ever hope to belong anywhere. He can feel it as he walks around the training ground, it’s like everywhere Messi has left the ghost of his presence behind.
He thinks about the few jittering touches they’ve shared. Messi had hugged him after the club world cup final, and it left Neymar shaking for hours afterwards, so badly that his dad had nearly taken him to hospital.
“You’ll be alright, won’t you, Juninho?” his mum fusses over him, trying to rub some stain off his cheek that only she can see.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay,” he says and flashes her the biggest grin he can muster. It feels hollow and brittle, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
He’s heard things about Messi, the cold genius, the inhuman star. How he’s a little odd, doesn’t talk much, doesn’t like to spend much time with his teammates and most definitely won’t like someone as loud and warm as Neymar is. He gets a fair warning from Xavi before he meets Messi for the first time as his teammate. ‘Don’t expect too much, alright?’ is what he can parse with his fumbling Spanish. And he tries to listen, but the more he pushes down his expectations that stronger hope seems to crystallise, digging, jagged and sharp into the inside of his sternum every time he takes a breath.
‘Don’t expect too much’. It would be enough, he thinks, to be able to play in the same team, to breathe the same air, Neymar is desperate just to get even that.
But Messi isn’t like that, he nothing like anyone says at all. He’s painfully human, a little nervous, a little untouchable, but he sits awkwardly next to Neymar when he cries and wraps an uncertain arm around his shoulders, murmuring quiet reassurances into his ear. His hand is cold against Neymar’s skin, but his words are warm. Neymar feels all at once shielded from the prickling curious gaze of everyone else in the changing room like Messi has pulled a curtain between them.
“Thank you, Messi,” he mumbles afterwards, scrubbing at his eyes.
“Leo, you can call me Leo,” is all he says in reply, pressing a soft kiss to the top of Neymar’s head before he goes. The feeling lingers, settling down through his skull and into his blood, and that seed that so many years ago had lodged itself into the chambers of his heart begins to bloom, its vines digging into muscle, roots seeking blood. It hurts, he trembles.
The word love passes through his mind briefly, but it doesn’t seem to fit right. Love shouldn’t feel like tearing the flesh clean from his bones, shouldn’t feel like someone digging their nails deep into his skin.
“Okay, Leo,” Neymar says shakily, smiling up at him. And Leo smiles back, although his eyes remain dark and blank, a night sky without stars. It makes Neymar shudder and he can’t look away, he doesn’t want to.
Neymar thinks he imagines it the first time. It’s at training, just a simple 5v5 match, the two of them on opposite teams. Leo feels untouchable as he dribbles the ball the pitch, it seems all at once that he takes up a space far larger than himself, unnaturally so. Neymar is there to try and make a tackle, but when he slides across the grass he can’t touch him, he can’t touch him. In that moment he stares up at him and in the instant before his eyes flicker closed he sees something he shouldn’t.
It’s not Leo there. In Leo’s place there are a thousand burning eyes and a thousand gaping mouths, each of them a hollow aching abyss crammed with teeth and howling. Neymar’s ears ring with the screaming of a crowd louder than any stadium he’s been in except all coming from one tiny pinprick in space. From Leo’s body.
Neymar curls up on the ground, arms wrapped around his head and bile rising in his throat, his heart pounding terribly in his chest like it wants to escape. He saw something he shouldn’t, something nobody should. Something indescribable, impossible.
But when he dares to lift his head, trembling in fear, there’s nothing. There’s no blood, no eyes, no teeth, they’re at the training grounds just like they were before. Leo looks down at him, softly concerned as he always does.
“Are you alright?” he asks him, a human hand on his shoulder. Normal, cool, there are hairs on the backs of his knuckles.
Neymar just nods, not daring to take his eyes off where Rafa is in quiet conversation with Geri in the corner. He can’t look at Leo, the thought of it makes him feel teeth around his throat. “Sorry I’m tired is all, didn’t sleep well,” he manages to choke out.
Leo is so human again, painful in his sincerity and gentle with it too. Neymar manages to wrench his head around, clasping their hands together and let himself be pulled to his feet. Nothing flickers where it isn’t supposed to, Neymar almost wonders if what he saw earlier was just his imagination (but it wasn’t, he knows he wasn’t).
He wasn’t imagining things, he couldn’t be. Whatever it was, the thing that sometimes appears in Leo’ place, and now that he’s seen it once he seems to notice it everywhere. Leo is sometimes too beautiful, grotesquely so. Neymar sees him with skin that glows like molten gold, a mouth filled impossibly with teeth and his eyes. His eyes. Each bulging eye is fixed on him, sharp as a dagger which cleaves through him, through skin, muscle, fat and bone, straight to the core of himself.
Under the bright lights of the stadium Leo’s shadow stretches just beyond where it should, a thousand shifting forms with limbs and wings and indescribable things that disappear just before you can focus on it. No one else seems to notice, but Neymar also realises that no one likes to look Leo in the eyes, not Xavi or Andres or even Gerard. Everyone’s gaze always seems to skirt just around him, never looking fully, never seeing him.
He doesn’t understand it, how can someone be watched by so many millions and yet no one ever really looks at him. Whenever someone try their gazes are pulled away like a fishhook pierced through an eye, popped out and dripping, you can’t help but be dragged away. But somehow now that Neymar has seen it once he can’t look away, he can’t stop himself, he’s never been able to stop when it comes to Leo.
He does things with a ball that shouldn’t be possible, a pass that bends impossibly through the air to land at your feet, a shot that glitches across the field and into the net. He dribbles through you, steps right through an opposition player’s ribcage and leaves them a splattered corpse torn apart on the ground. The next moment though they’re back and whole again, bewildered at how Leo got past them as if they weren’t just deconstructed in-front of everyone’s eyes.
Neymar stares at Sergio Ramos and tries not to think about how twenty minutes ago he saw his skull cracked open, splattered brains leaking clear fluid onto the grass.
He slaps Neymar on the back and he tries to smile up at him. He likes Sergio, likes how he burns on the pitch and laughs about it afterwards, doesn’t like thinking about how he’s tasted his blood sprayed into his open, panting mouth as he’s run behind Leo.
“Good game, Messi was an alien,” he says, grinning.
Neymar nudges him with his shoulder and laughs, “as usual.” Sergio’s intestines spilling out, the white shirt being stained a bright, unbearable red, his dark brown eyes staring blankly upwards, a fragment of blue Bernabeu sky reflected in them. Neymar doesn’t want to think about who this person is, how many different Sergios he’s bumped shoulders with, laughed alongside, smiled up at.
He sees Leo lurking at the door to the changing room, staring out through the crowd as if he’s looking for someone and he gives his excuses, saying his goodbyes. The first time they met Sergio’s hands were warm, every time they’ve seen each after that they get colder. Now when Sergio ruffles his hair Neymar shivers, it’s like being touched by a corpse.
Leo makes Neymar wants to bolt, lately he can barely stand to be in the same room as him, as it. His head aches and heart pounds just being nearby. He feels like a rabbit that has been put into a cage with a fox, one that hasn’t been fed for days. The terrible fear of a prey animal with teeth around its neck.
“Neymar,” he almost leaps out of his chair at the sound of Leo’s voice. His human one, not the other one that sounds like the screaming of a crowd and the blaring of trumpets and echoes endlessly, leaving Neymar’s ears ringing for hours.
“Is anything wrong?” he tries his best to smile, but it falters. Instead, he reaches out and wraps his hand around Leo’ wrist, pulling him to sit next to him. The touch reassures him that this is Leo, and he’s still human. He doesn’t let go, idly tracing his fingers across the back of Leo’s hand and not looking up at him. When he touches him the thing seems to retreat slightly, returns to thrum under his skin instead of bursting forth where Neymar can see it.
“You’ve been distant, you look tired.”
“It’s nothing, just not enough sleep.”
It’s the truth, Neymar hasn’t been sleeping well lately. If he’s seen Leo that day he dreams of a violin string snapping, the ringing in your ears after you’ve hit your head too hard, and metal scraping against metal over and over. When he wakes up all the hairs on his body are standing up and he spends the mornings feeling like it’s the moment before a lightning strike.
He tries his best not to sleep, it’s better to stay awake and be able to watch the shadows stay in their place. They don’t move when he’s watching, only when he looks away or closes his eyes. He spends his nights on his knees, rosary clutched between his fingers and babbling prayers like he thinks they do anything at all. His knees are bruised and aching in the mornings, where the frail dawn light doesn’t seem to chase anything away at all.
“Well sleep early tonight – come, let me drive you home,” Leo says as he pulls Neymar to his feet.
The complaints die in his throat, what excuses could he possibly give? Not when Leo is leading him away with such earnestness. His hands are so firm, so human, that Neymar doubts himself, but not enough to unlink their arms as they walk back to the car. He holds Leo close enough that he can feel his warmth bleeding through his coat.
They drive in silence, even though Neymar doesn’t stop speaking it seems more like he hasn’t said a thing. Leo doesn’t say much in reply, just quiet hums and soft laughter that makes Neymar tremble with warmth.
When they arrive Leo parks and follows him inside without a word, Neymar can feel the prickle of his gaze against the back of his neck the whole time. He swallows as he unlocks the door, about to mumble something about being tired when Leo turns to him – in a flash a mess of claws and gold and flesh and then gone, then almost human.
“You know,” he speaks in a voice that seems to come from outside his body, “you’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
Neymar takes a step back as Leo takes a step forward. He can’t help it, he shouldn’t be scared of Leo, one of his closest friends, but something’s not right even now. His skin seems to shudder as if something is trying to claw out of it. Too golden, too perfect, oh so covered in blood that Neymar knows is not its own. And his eyes. Neymar can’t look away from his eyes. They’re not black, not a colour, they’re two twin holes, the absence of light.
“Stop,” he gasps out, voice shaking so much he barely recognises it as his own. His back hits the wall and he presses himself against it. He needs to run, he has to run, but he can’t take his eyes off it, the thousands of limbs that reach out for him, claws that dig into the filaments between every strand of muscle.
“I can’t, Neymar please,” it cries out, “you see it, you see me. Please, Ney.”
He looks afraid, Neymar has never seen Leo so terrified before. All of a sudden it doesn’t matter, the thing that looks like Leo or Leo himself. Neymar has seen him render grown men into piles of flesh, but he loves him, has always loved him, and nothing else seems to matter. He holds out his arms and whatever it is falls into them.
He gasps, his eyes squeezing shut. He holds the warm body of his friend, of Leo, as around them the darkness presses in, teeth that tear into him, cracking straight into his bone marrow. It’s like he’s been swallowed by some giant beast, everywhere is warm wet flesh and the stink of stomach acid. It burns so much he thinks it must have melted him right through his muscle. But through it all Leo holds him tight.
He doesn’t know how many hours they stand there until it begins to fade, like the coming around from a dream, waking from a coma, opening your eyes after a metamorphosis. He doesn’t feel quite the same as he was before.
“Leo?” he croaks out, voice strangely hoarse as if he’s been screaming. Leo is still clinging to him, face buried in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Leo whispers, the sound seems to resonate through Neymar’s sternum but feels defiantly human, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I am. You’re the only one who’s seen me–”
“Only one? Ever?”
“Ever.”
That answer lodges itself in Neymar’s throat, he hadn’t thought of that before, that he could be the only one. Not Antonella, not even – and the bile rises in his throat at the thought of them, his children. Neymar is only one in the world who knows what Leo is, or at least knows what he’s not: human.
Leo finally lifts his head, looking up at him with heartbreaking eyes. He realises something in that instant, that there is no Leo and the other, there is no separation. Only Leo, only his friend, only him. Neymar pulls him closer and presses their foreheads together.
“You should leave,” Leo whispers, although he doesn’t pull away, “transfer, go back to Brazil, anywhere, just forget that you’ve ever known me.”
Neymar just laughs, quiet and desperate. “I could never, not in a thousand years,” he closes his eyes, Leo feels so human in his arms. He kisses him, soft and careful like he would a lover, unafraid that Leo will bare his teeth. “I won’t leave you alone and you won’t hurt me, I know that.”
“Do you know that?” Leo murmurs against his lips.
“I do,” Neymar replies. He’s not sure where this confidence comes from, but all that time, all these haunted and sleepless nights never once has he been afraid that Leo would hurt him. The fear was much more primal than that, the fear of something else, the something that came before life, before existence itself.
“I could kill you, I could do worse than that,” Leo says as if trying to convince him that he would.
Neymar should be terrified but instead something horrible and giddy claws at his throat, all he can do is laugh. He wants it, for Leo to be the one to destroy him, how can he be afraid when he craves it.
He doesn’t know what comes over him in that moment, but he leans forwards, smiling and ducking his head, pressing his lips against Leo’s throat. He’s gentle for one moment before he bares his teeth and bites, bites and carries on biting, teeth tearing through Leo’s flesh. There’s so much blood he almost chokes on it, feels it pouring out of his mouth and down onto his chest. He shakes his head like a dog gnawing at a bone, teeth grinding against gristle and tendon and skin as he tears a chunk free.
He lifts his head, looking at Leo. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t react at all, bloodied hands carding gently through Neymar’s hair. Neymar has ripped straight through his windpipe, blood spraying with every breath he takes. He stands there watching Neymar as he chews slowly and then swallows, swallowing a piece of Leo down into his stomach. He can feel it lying there, melting into his stomach lining, becoming part of him the way Leo always has been.
He kisses him again, sweet as blood, as if to seal the promise. “I’m here, I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
Leo looks at him consideringly like a farmer looks at fine cattle at an auction, appraisingly. “I’m part of you now,” he says, smearing his thumb through his blood on Neymar’s cheek, pressing against his lips until he opens his mouth and lets it slip inside, tasting him again, “you’re part of me.”
Neymar blinks and he’s twelve years old again, watching Barcelona play on TV, but this time Leo stares at him through the screen and grins. He’s eighteen and Leo leans in and kisses him in-front of the entire stadium, he’s nineteen and Leo tears his throat out with his bare teeth on stage, he’s twenty-two and Leo fucks him right there in the changing room with all of their teammates watching. Every memory twists and warps out of recognition, but it all remains the same.
Love, he was wrong before because this is love, he realises. This can only be love.
Leo looks at him with those inhuman eyes and smiles. Neymar feels his blood burn in his veins, melting into every crevasse of himself and he doesn’t look away. A rabbit staring down the throat of a beast knowing he’ll die to keep it fed. Joy sings in his heart, and he can’t do anything but smile back.