Chapter Text
Even though he was jet lagged, Luka woke up before his alarm. He sat up and sighed, opening his mouth wide and rotating his jaw and neck until they cracked. He’d woken up the same way every day since he got back to campus a week ago: achy from grinding his teeth at night, sore from the thin dorm mattress, sweaty from the humid summer air. Minnesota, where Luka was going to school on a soccer scholarship, was freezing in the winter but hot and humid as Croatia in the summer, and the air conditioning in his dorm was apparently broken this year.
Luka dressed and went for his morning run, getting even sweatier and sorer. He passed a few other guys from the team as he ran the path beside the small lake a few blocks from campus, and they nodded at him quickly without taking out their earbuds.
After his run he stepped into dorm bathroom, loud and echoey and empty, turned on only the cold water and let himself stand under it for long moments, cooling off; swaying with exhaustion. He’d flown back from Croatia a week ago after spending a month with his family over the summer. He’d spent his weeks at home lying on beaches and working out and playing cards with his family, and had spent the flight back to the U.S. telling himself, I’ll do better this year. He’d ended the last semester so stressed out and guilty that he felt like he’d never get back home; like he’d be trapped in his tiny florescent dorm with math textbooks in front of him and papers to write and missed calls from his mom on his phone for the rest of his life. When he finally stepped out of his gate at the airport in Zagreb he’d seen his mom and sister waiting for him with big smiles and waves and had dropped himself into their tight, warm embraces and barely kept from crying. The weight of all the things he'd spent the year away from them wanting to do and not doing had hung around his neck like a medal. It had earned him their love, but it was so heavy it hurt, and their arms around him felt like the only thing keeping him from drowning.
On the flight back to Minnesota, Luka had imagined the year ahead of him exactly how he wanted it to be: He would stop wanting things he wasn't supposed to want. He would have a great season and score more goals than last year. He would get A’s in all his classes. He would make his family proud. He wouldn’t run so hard and far every morning before practice that he hurt himself. He would play in the conference final, not watch it from the sidelines. He would get bought by a professional team. He would make himself not feel lonely, because it was stupid and weak and pointless anyway.
But it had been hard not to feel that as he landed in a cold, busy airport with no one to greet him, got in a cab driven by a guy who didn’t say a word to him, and set his one suitcase down in an empty dorm room.
Today would be better, because it was the first day of preseason training, and he would get to see and talk to his teammates, and even though they were truly just his teammates and not his friends, he still felt a pulse of excitement strong enough to finally make him shut off the cold water and step out of the shower.
Luka dressed in his training gear and walked the short few blocks from his dorm to the practice field. He could smell the fresh cut grass and hear the sound of balls being kicked and of guys laughing and yelling before he even stepped through the gate, and he smiled, which felt good and then made him laugh a little at himself for being so fucked up that smiling felt special.
“Luka!” he heard from a few paces behind him as he stepped onto the field. He recognized Karim’s loud, deep voice and quickly turned toward him, grinning. Karim jogged the short distance between them and slapped him, hard and casual, on the arm. “How was your break?” he asked Luka, ambling onto the field and looking around, waving at a few of their other teammates.
“It was good,” Luka said, taking Karim in as he walked a half a pace behind him: he’d clearly been working hard to stay in shape over the summer, and looked even more fit than he had at the end of last season.
Luka and Karim were two of only a few seniors on the team, so they’d played together for three years. They weren’t friends, but Luka knew him as well as he knew anyone in the country. Karim was calm and about a thousand times more laid back than Luka, but he was skilled and had scored more goals than anyone on the team last season, and Luka was glad to see that he seemed to be ready to take their final year as seriously as Luka was. “How was your summer?” Luka asked Karim, and then listened happily as Karim went on about his friends and his training schedule and where he'd travelled.
“Anyway,” Karim said, smiling down at Luka, “I’m happy to be back. We’re going to tear it up this season, right?” Luka opened his mouth to ask Karim what he thought about the season or whether he’d met any of the freshmen or where he was living when someone called Karim’s name and they both looked up to see Rafa, Karim’s best friend on the team, standing in the middle of the field waving Karim over. Karim nodded at Luka, slapped him on the back again, and turned quickly to jog toward Rafa with a big, beaming smile stretching his lips.
Luka wandered further onto the field and said hi to a few groups of guys. They all seemed genuinely happy to see him, but most people were absorbed in conversations with their friends that he didn’t want to interrupt, so he sat down on the soft, trimmed grass and started stretching.
He heard his name called in the coach’s firm, quiet voice and looked up to see Zidane walking toward him along with a younger guy in warm ups.
“Hi,” Luka said as the two men came to stand above him. He was always slightly in awe of Zidane, who had been an amazing professional player before he started coaching, but right now, the guy standing next to Zidane stole every ounce of Luka's attention.
He was tall, covered all over in sharp muscles and bronzed skin and swaths of tattoos. He had a thick, dark beard around wide lips that split into a smile like Luka would expect to see on a celebrity, teeth bright white and eyes sparkling in a way thay made Luka feel dazed. “This is Sergio Ramos,” Zidane told Luka. “He’s a transfer center back.”
“Hi,” Luka said again.
“This is Luka Modric,” Zidane said, motioning down to Luka and looking at Sergio. “He’s the guy I was telling you about. The best player on our team.”
Luka forced a smile. He’d had coaches and teammates say things like that to him before, and his parents had been telling him that kind of thing most of his life, but he hated hearing it. He imagined that when people told Karim that he was a great player and that the team wouldn’t work without him, Karim felt happy and proud and flattered, but Luka felt like another weight was being hung around his neck.
“I’m really excited to play with you,” Sergio said in a thickly accented voice, his wide, white smile still in place as he reached a hand down for Luka to shake. Luka reached up and looked at Sergio’s hand as it wrapped around his smaller one, stared too long at Sergio’s darker skin and the dark rose tattooed on the back of his hand. Luka pulled his hand back and nodded, and thencZidane and Sergio walked away and Luka went back to stretching and stretching and stretching, but he couldn't get the tension out of his muscles.
He watched in snuck glances as Sergio was introduced to a few of the other guys. He heard him speak in Spanish to some of the players, and noticed that he made almost everyone he met laugh and smile, and he understood why. Luka had read books where people were described as magnetic, but he’d never really got it before. But after a moment of interaction with Sergio, he understood: he wanted Sergio’s dark, sparkling eyes on him, wanted his bright, genuine looking smile, wanted to his warm hands back on his skin.
So he avoided Sergio as much as he could in practice for the rest of the week. He watched him from a distance, to get an idea of how he played and how Luka could best play alongside him, but he didn’t talk to him. And he was sure Sergio didn’t notice, because everyone else on the team seemed to want to talk to him all the time, crowding around him after practice and asking him to hang out after training was done.
Sergio was strong—Luka knew that from just looking at him, but he was surprised at how well he used his strength on the field, muscling other players off the ball and winning headers during set pieces. He was good at reading the ball, knowing when and where people were going to shoot or dribble. His passing could use work, and if he'd been Karim or one of the freshmen or basically anyone else, Luka would have offered him some advice or asked him if he wanted to practice together. But he wasn't a skinny freshman--he was tall and tattooed and constantly taking off his shirt and rolling up his shorts so that almost every inch of his muscled body was obscenely displayed, sweaty and shiny in the sun. And so Luka didn't offer to help him, even when he made stupid mistakes in scrimmages, giving the ball away close to goal by trying to do some clever dribble or risky pass.
At the end of the first week of practice, the team had to vote in a new captain and vice captain. Luka stood facing his locker as an assistant coach told everyone to write down their votes on tiny tears of paper he passed out and put them in a bucket in the middle of the room. Luka sat down and pressed his paper to his knee and carefully, slowly wrote down Karim. Karim wasn’t a very vocal leader but was well liked and a good player, and he was one of only a few seniors on the team, and obvipusly Luka wanted the captaincy like he wanted to breathe, but if he voted himself into it, it wouldn't really even count. He wrote Toni next, because he really couldn't think of anyone else to write. There were a lot of good players on the team, but not many who Luka really thought could put the team on their back if they needed to
Luka carefully folded his paper and put it in the box, trying not to think too much about how everyone else was voting and just quietly hoping. He loved leading the team on the pitch and helping other players when he could, and he knew that captaining the team, especially if they won the championship this season, would look good to any scouts that came to watch games.
Luka quickly showered and changed into his regular clothes. He said goodbyes to a few of the other guys, talked to Karim, whose locker was next to his, for a few minutes, and then walked back to his dorm. The team didn’t practice over the weekend during preseason, so he turned off his lights and went to bed early, settling in for a long, lonely two days.