william saliba x Fem!Reader
sy: during your pediatrics rotation, arsenal visits the children's ward to spend the afternoon with the patients. you think the children will be the ones leaving with unforgettable memories... until william saliba volunteers to have his face painted and somehow becomes your favorite patient of the day
a/n: i don't know if you've noticed, but i end up writing a lot of stories where the reader works in healthcare 😭 i think it's just because that's my field, so it's easier for me to imagine little details and situations like this. i guess i naturally gravitate toward it. anyway, i hope you enjoy this little silly story
sorry if there are any writing or translation mistakes
Mia was seven years old and had very clear opinions about butterflies.
You discovered this three minutes into the painting, when she tilted her head slightly and said, with the authority of someone who had given this considerable thought "The left wing is smaller than the right."
You looked at the left wing. Looked at the right. They were essentially identical, but there was something in the seriousness of Mia's expression that made you add a millimetre of paint anyway.
"Better," she confirmed, satisfied.
This was the kind of thing nobody told you about the paediatric ward before you arrived. Not the butterfly part, the part about how children taught you to be precise in ways no clinical manual covered. Mia needed the wings to be symmetrical. Tiago last week had asked you to explain in detail what you were doing with the bandage before letting you touch his arm. Little Íris, four years old, had held your hand during a difficult procedure, and it hadn't been you comforting her, it had been her comforting you, with the specific gravity of children who understand more than they can articulate.
You had understood better in practice than in theory what your supervisor had said on the first day "they need medicine, but they also need everything medicine can't give."
There was a study you had read during your first year — taken seriously at the time, confirmed in the daily reality of the placement — about the effect of human contact on hospitalised patients. Even an artificial hand, designed only to simulate the weight and warmth of a palm against skin, measurably altered vital signs. Blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol. The human body, regardless of age, responded to touch as though it were a reminder that it wasn't alone.
You thought about this sometimes when you held a child's hand during an examination. That perhaps the most important half of the work was exactly that, being present in a way medicine alone couldn't be.
The ward was noisy that Thursday afternoon in a way that was different from the usual. Not the heavy noise of emergencies, not the tense quiet that preceded bad news, it was alive noise, textured with anticipation, the kind children produce when they know something good is coming before they know exactly what. The nurses had arrived with the smiles of people keeping a secret. Discreet decorations had appeared in the corridors. And the children, with that perception children have of things adults think they're hiding, were more alert than usual.
You had been reminded of the Arsenal visit in the previous day's meeting. During the shift you had forgotten entirely, because it had been the kind of day where things happened in sequence and didn't leave room for anything beyond the next task. Your supervisor had delegated responsibilities with the efficiency of someone doing this for the tenth time, then added, almost as a footnote at the end "and you'll help with the face painting in the afternoon, since your handwriting is the best on the team."
You had opened your mouth. Closed it. Decided that wasn't the most urgent argument of the moment.
So there you were, with the brush and the paints and Mia and her asymmetrical butterflies, and the unofficial queue of children waiting behind her with requests ranging from stars to tigers to at least three versions of Spider-Man that you were improvising with the creativity of someone genuinely willing to try.
The players had arrived earlier and gone through the rooms with a care you had noticed from a distance, between moments in your shift. Not the protocol time of a charity visit, real time, sitting on the edge of the bed, talking about football and cartoons and whatever the child wanted to talk about. There was something in it that arrived in your chest before you could name it. Gratitude, perhaps. Or simply the recognition that some people understood, without anyone needing to explain it, that being present was different from showing up.
You were finishing the Spider-Man mask — which had come out reasonably well, all things considered — when you noticed someone had stopped near your chair.
You didn't look up immediately, because the line you were on had to be finished before anything else. But you noticed, with the peripheral attention that months of shifts had developed, that it wasn't a child. The trainers were different, and the shadow falling across the floor beside you belonged to someone significantly taller than any patient in the ward.
When you finished the line and looked up, there was a tall man standing at a close but respectful distance, with the unhurried posture of someone accustomed to occupying space without needing to assert it. And beside him, holding the hem of his shirt with one hand — the other still attached to the drip, was Noah.
You knew who he was without effort — the hospital list had circulated, but there was also the simple fact of having grown up in a house where football was the primary language. Arsenal defender. French. His height was information the photographs communicated incompletely, as you were discovering now.
The reference point at that moment was you, sitting in a chair made for six-year-olds, with the brush still in hand.
"Hi," he said, the accent arriving before any other information. "Are you still taking people?"
You looked at him. At Noah, who wore the expression of someone with delegated authority. At the queue of children behind them. Back at him.
"You want face paint," you said. It wasn't a question.
"Noah said it was mandatory to get to the good part of the party." He said this with complete seriousness that lasted exactly the right amount of time before a small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. "Noah is six years old and has a drip in his arm, so I thought I should respect his authority."
Noah, beside him, nodded with the gravity of someone confirming a decision already made.
You sat with that for a second.
Then gestured to the chair in front of you — the one the children used, which was going to be completely disproportionate for someone of his height — and he sat in it with the ease of someone who had decided situations didn't embarrass him.
There was something different about having an adult in the chair.
Children went still in a specific way when you were close with the brush, the stillness of someone who trusts the process without fully understanding it. With him it was different. He was at ease in a way that didn't need announcing, elbows on his knees, his weight leaning slightly forward, and he looked at you with an attention you immediately recognised as different from the kind he'd had with the children. More focused. More direct. The kind that wasn't passing through the moment but was inside it.
"What would you like?" you asked, opening the paints.
"Whatever you recommend."
"Spider-Man is the most requested."
"Could I suggest something different?" There was a lightness in that which wasn't exactly a tease but came close. "You choose."
You looked at him. He was looking back with that expression that carried the smile without quite being one — and you decided it was easier to look at the paints than to hold that contact without looking away.
"Lion," he repeated, with the easy agreement of someone who didn't need more explanation.
You dipped the brush into the orange and leaned forward, and the distance between you shrank in a way you registered before deciding not to register it. He was tall even sitting, you had to raise your arm to reach his cheek at the right angle, and to steady the stroke you placed your thumb lightly against his jaw, his skin warmer than expected, and he went completely still beneath that contact like someone who understood that moving anything might ruin something.
A strand of your hair escaped and fell forward. You tucked it behind your ear without taking your eyes off the work, and when you glanced up briefly to check the proportions you found his eyes.
Not in a way that needed to be managed, not in a way that made anything uncomfortable — it was simply that attention of his, calm and complete, the kind that doesn't simulate interest but has it. You went back to the stroke. The warmth that rose up your neck you attributed to the temperature of the room.
"Stay still," you said, with the authority of someone who had been saying that to children all afternoon.
"Looking isn't the same thing as not staying still," he said, and there was something in that too precise to refute easily.
You decided not to refute it. You continued the stroke.
The line was straight. That was what mattered.
"Are you a doctor here?" he asked, when you paused to change brushes.
"Trainee," you said. "Still in the process."
"You don't seem like it."
You glanced up briefly. "Why?"
"The way the children look at you." He said it as an observation, not as a constructed compliment — and that difference arrived before you could catalogue it. "Like they know you know what you're doing. That's not something learned in the first year of a placement."
You went back to the mane detail without answering immediately, because the answer needed a moment to exist genuinely and not just reactively. "They notice when you're pretending," you said finally. "Children are like that. Much faster than adults."
"So you're not pretending."
"I'm pretending I know how to do a lion," you said.
His laugh was low and genuine — no performance, no construction, the laugh of someone who found something funny and didn't need to announce it.
The room continued around you with the indifference of crowded spaces, and there was in it a pocket — quieter, more defined — that existed only between the small chair and the brush and the orange paint and the two seconds of silence between one sentence and the next. Noah had gone back to playing with another child. Neither of you had noticed when.
You worked in silence for a few minutes. He stayed still with the patience of someone entirely comfortable where they were.
"Do you go to matches?" he asked, in a pause between one detail and the next.
"Sometimes. When the rota allows."
"Sometimes," you repeated, with the same inflection as before.
A small silence. Then: "Do you support Arsenal?"
"I like Liverpool." You kept your focus on the brush. "But not fanatically."
You looked at him. He had that expression from before — the one with the smile that wasn't quite a smile — and there was in it a confidence that wasn't arrogance, simply the posture of someone who believes what they say and doesn't feel the need to justify it.
"Arsenal will convince you," he continued, "or I will."
"Those are different strategies," you said, "with different track records."
"Arsenal has more." A calculated pause.
"No, it doesn't," you said with a small laugh.
You laughed before you could stop it — short, honest, the kind that comes out when something is more precise than expected. "That was very confident," you said.
"It was honest," he said, simply.
"I don't know about that," you said, the smile still on your face, and went back to the final detail of the lion.
There was in the I don't know an opening you hadn't planned, but which came out anyway, and there was in the silence that followed the quality of someone who had noticed that opening and was, calmly, deciding what to do with it.
It was Noah who broke the silence.
He had come back without you noticing and was standing beside the chair, looking from you to William and back to you with the six-year-old seriousness that is sometimes more perceptive than six years should be.
"Are you two dating?" he asked.
The room didn't stop. Nobody nearby paid attention. But you felt the warmth rise up your neck in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
"No," you said, with the professional composure of someone answering a clinical question.
"Oh." Noah considered this. "He smiles differently when he talks to you."
William said nothing. But when you glanced up — very briefly, very quickly — there was something on his face that wasn't exactly discomfort. It was closer to someone being seen from an angle they hadn't expected to be seen from.
You went back to the brush. "Almost done," you said, to no one in particular.
"Done," you said, leaning back to look.
The lion had come out well. Better than expected, the mane with more texture than the children's versions because you had spent more time on it. You found the small mirror on the table and handed it over without comment.
He looked. Kept looking for longer than you expected, with an expression you couldn't fully read.
"It's good," he said finally.
"I'm not." He lowered the mirror and looked at you. "Just thinking it's going to be difficult to wash off."
"Soap and water," you said. "It'll come off."
"What if I don't want it to?"
The question arrived with a lightness that had a layer underneath that wasn't light, and you sat with it for a second before going back to organising the paints with the efficiency of someone who has more to do.
"You'll sleep with a lion on your face," you said.
He stood from the chair with that same ease, and the height difference was apparent again in a way you noticed more than the first time. He ran a hand briefly through his hair, looked in the direction he was heading, then back at you — with an expression you wouldn't have had simple words for if someone asked.
"Thank you," he said. "For the lion."
"You're welcome," you said. "For Noah."
Something shifted briefly on his face — the recognition that you had been paying attention from the beginning, to the six-year-old and the drip and the delegated authority. "I'll stop by him before I leave," he said.
He stayed a moment longer than a goodbye required, hands in his pockets and that calm that seemed to be his default, and then said: "Do you work every Thursday?"
"There's a home match next Thursday." A pause. "You're still convinced Liverpool is better?"
"Maybe I'll change that," he said, with a small sideways smile that didn't expect a reply, and walked toward Noah's room with that usual posture, without looking back.
You stood with the brush in your hand and the clear awareness that that had been the most indirect invitation possible and that you had understood it completely.
Ana appeared at your side and tugged at your sleeve. "I want a butterfly."
"Butterfly is next," you said, and leaned back into the work.
But there was a smile at the corner of your mouth you weren't managing well — which was, by your usual standards, new enough to notice.
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