Chapter Text
Roy knows it's coming. It's been coming, for longer than he cares to admit. He sees it in the faces of the PTs, sees it in the lineups and plays that Beard and Nate draw up. He sees it in how it's pointedly not written all over Ted's face - that man's in even deeper denial than Roy is.
Roy feels it in his fucking bones. No one knows it better than him, for all he refuses to say it out loud. He's old. He's slow. He's past his prime. He's an echo of an era long gone, the last of a generation long since put out to pasture. His left knee is one rainy day, one careless pivot, one heated tackle away from splintering like dry wood. He's moments away from an injury that would end a career that by all rights should've been over for a while now.
He wishes for it sometimes. Closes his eyes and ears against the constant stream of criticism veiled in concern, and dreams of something violent and bloody, something to hold up for the world to see - an indisputable testament to his pain. He aches, and wishes for something to take it out of his hands. To make the choice for him.
They blow right past him, these fresh, young things. Blood burning, lungs bellowing, hearts pumping wild but steady. They run circles around him and they make a point of doing so. Take pleasure in it. He used to be one of them - used to be the fucking best of them. Now he's a has-been whose anger and bitterness as atrophying his muscles. Nate hadn't known how right he'd been in that Everton locker room. All of Roy's anger is still in there, and he has absolutely no way of getting it out.
Roy Kent once captained the English national team to a World Cup semi-final. Earlier today, he captained AFC Richmond to a brutal, humiliating 3-1 loss against Brighton Hove & fucking Albion.
After that, he zoned out as much as he could while the physios iced his knee and poked and prodded him, all while they tutted and shook their heads and told him - like so many times before - in soft, compassionate voices that this couldn't go on much longer. He didn't even scoff at their astounding level of hypocritical bullshit as they then promptly shot him up with his usual cocktail of steroid injections and did everything in their power to wring more minutes out of him. They'll do anything to prolong his slouching towards retirement, and he lets them.
Now, he lies on a mediocre bed, in a frankly depressing room, in a quite shit hotel just off the A23, and tries not to imagine the grim reaper of football knocking on its flimsy door.
"Brighton has much to offer when it comes t-"
He jambs his thumb into the remote over and over, desperately trying to find something sufficiently mind-numbing. His body is restless, the way it always is after a match, the way it especially is after a loss. It's only gotten worse with age; these days he has so much more drive and anger and energy than his body can properly output and disperse. It just sits there buzzing under his skin, like an itch in his muscles that he can't scratch. It makes him ache. It makes him miss, fiercely, the days when he walked off the pitch after a full '90 and felt good.
His body was his in those days. A tool, working perfectly, that he knew exactly how to use. Something he was one with. Muscles and sinew and nerves and blood that he used and used and used, and in return, it gave him pleasure even as it burned.
These days, his body isn't really a home he lives in so much as it is a dilapidated building in which he's being held hostage. At best, it brings him discomfort. Most of the time it brings him frustration. At worst - which is pretty much all of the time as well, if he's honest - it brings him a wide variety of different kinds of pain, protesting loudly at the things he asks of it. Right now, on this mediocre bed, in this frankly depressing room, in this quite shit hotel just off the A23, his body feels foreign, distant, and uncomfortable.
Down the corridor a door is slammed without consideration for the other people on this floor. Roy hears voices through the thin (very quite shit) walls. It seems some of the lads are still a bit rowdy despite the loss. McAdoo's commanding voice rumbles across the into Roy's room. Hughes' softer reply sneaks under his door like a stray cat. Jamie fucking Tartt's laughter explodes through the wall like the kool-aid man, seeking Roy out personally.
He tries not to hate them just because they're still young and physically able and untouched by the weary cynicism of age. He's only moderately successful, but he's also not trying very hard.
He hears them say goodnight - it's like they're having their conversation inside Roy's room, Jesus Christ this hotel's shit - before McAdoo and Hughes walk off down the hall. Roy closes his eyes and listens to the beep of a keycard in the door of the room next to his, listens to it open and close. Listens to the thumps of Tartt kicking his trainers off, of him throwing himself on his own mediocre bed with all the careless grace of a 23 year old pro-athlete who enjoys living in his own body.
You know, I had a poster of you on my wall when I was a kid. Used to love watchin' you play.
Roy opens his eyes.