this is all my draft could produce and now idk if i can write anything else which makes me sad bc this is sad.☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️ konise injured tgt snippet
Stadionul Dr. Constantin Rădulescu. June 25, 2023
Michael can hear the team clattering back into the locker room, loud and rowdy, with another win under their belt. It’s a lot of indiscernible hooting, banging on lockers, until someone finds a bluetooth speaker and Daft Punk is rattling the walls, the same song that echoed through the stadium when Michael had scored, just minutes before everything had come crashing down. The racket encroaches on his quiet hiding spot in the physio room.
He wonders absurdly if, in the wake of victory, they’ve forgotten about him, the goalscorer who had ostensibly sent them through to the next round before hobbling off the field and out the tournament. The paper on the treatment table crinkles as he shifts uncomfortably. Under his leg, there is a miniscule rip in the sheet, likely from the condensation of the ice dripping down and pooling on the surface. Inside his thigh, there is a tear in his hamstring.
When Michael had collided with the keeper, it was instant, time cleaving into two until there was only the before and then the after. Like the match was a magic trick that he was determined to unravel, but the second he blinked, they had pulled the rug out from under him and he was tumbling without even seeing the sleight. As if someone had reached down from the heavens, into his body and tore the muscle clean off the bone without thought.
Michael doesn’t remember how they brought him back, how they put his mind back into his body under the examination of harsh white LEDs and the cold of the fan’s heavy whir. On the pitch, under the heavy thrum of adrenaline, there was an insistent urge to get back up, to stand and walk it off, but Michael had barely made it two steps before the pain lanced through his thigh, excruciating and red-hot. Someone must’ve caught him before he ate shit because there is no taste of grass and dirt in his mouth, only salt and iron.
It comes back to him in pieces: a warm body under his arm to clutch at, a hand pressing insistently against the hurt, as if to staunch an open wound, and then, a high noise, like a wounded animal with its hind legs caught in the inescapable maw of a steel trap. A rabbit in a bear trap, tendons snapped violently from a snare meant for something larger. In hindsight, that pitiful sound could have only come from himself.
Even under the maximum amount of painkillers that they have allowed him, Michael feels a phantom twinge in his thigh throb morbidly in time with the bass pulsing outside. Simon, who had examined his leg with clinical efficiency and mercilessly delivered the ruling of a severe hamstring tear, likely Grade 3 and surgery, frowns at Michael’s eyes welling up again.
“Does it still hurt?” Simon asks, prodding at the ice bundle.
Michael wants to throw something across the room, but there’s nothing under his hands except for the crumpling paper. Of course, it still hurts in his leg, in his head, in his heart. Everywhere he turns, there is the reminder that he is no longer the same, the fear that he might never return. Michael shakes his head.
“That’s good.” Simon passes him a cold bottle of water and stands to leave. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
Michael nods.
The door opens, a wall crumbling before a flood of noise. Michael catches a brief glimpse of bleu, blanc, et rouge before it shuts heavy and solid. The noise quiets, muffled like he has sunk deep underwater, before the door reopens again and Michael resurfaces.
Under the music, he can make out Simon’s voice, “One at a time, guys.”
That's the only warning he gets before Manu is shouldering through the entrance, beating someone else to the punch.
“I’ll tell him, I swear,” he assures someone outside before the door snicks shut.
Manu turns around, radiant in victory, and Michael can’t look at him straight without blinding himself on the white of his kit, his smile, his joy, all of which seems horribly misplaced in the tepid beige of these walls.
Michael must not be doing a good job at reining in his emotions, if the way Manu’s mouth turns downwards means anything. He reaches out, hand sliding high up on Michael’s leg, above the ice and the wrap. It’s a familiar touch, except for a pity that is too gentle, as if he is fragile and breakable beyond the body. Handle with care, the cold compress cautions. Michael wonders what his own face looks like between the misery and anger and despair.
Michael doesn’t move to dislodge him, not that he could anyways.
“How bad is it?” Manu asks, quiet as if that could soften the edge.
“Done for the tournament, for sure,” Michael exhales, balancing on the cusp of it all. “Maybe surgery.” There is the undeniable truth, and there is what he cannot yet stomach.
Still, he doesn’t want to look up, to see the pity, the regret, whatever condolences are playing out across Manu’s face. Can’t look up anyways when Manu wraps him up in a tight hug, sweat and all, and his face is now snug against Manu’s chest.
“Next year,” Manu whispers into Michael’s hair. “The Olympics.” A declaration, a promise, a prayer to make him whole again, but it does not absolve Michael of this failure, of the present.
Manu pulls back to look him in the eyes. Under any scrutiny, Michael tends to deflect: “One match at a time.”
And it works, Manu laughs once, a peal of brightness. “You know we got you. We’re winning it all. This year, and the next.”
The insistence of it all itches at Michael. Manu says it readily as if it’s nothing, like Michael can indeed be whole enough for him, for the team, even in this state.
Michael tilts his face up, asking. Manu obliges easily with no qualms and presses a small kiss to the corner of his mouth, distant enough for it to mean nothing if he wants it to. Close enough for Michael to smile a bit more.
“You’ll come back stronger.”
Michael nods once, wants to say something else now that he’s got him, but Manu is already disappearing through the door, back into the world.
Back in London, they cut into his leg, stitch the tendon close to the bone, and close the wound back up, presumably with a neat little knot under the bandage. The doctor prescribes him at least a week of rest and relaxation before rehab and sends him home with enough medication to knock out a baby elephant. Michael heeds this new regimen with little complaint.
The days melt into each other and time flattens under the weight of too many naps. There is no reason or rhyme to when he wakes, emerging from a sea of painkillers that muddle the difference between sunset and sunrise. The tournament goes on, but the television isn’t in his bedroom and the Channel 4 app won’t stop buffering endlessly, so Michael can only watch the FotMob notifications roll in. The newest one pops to the top.
14’
Delay in match due to injury: M. Koné (FRA)
Substitution: E. Le Fée
His phone slips between his fingers and falls onto the floor, unreachable under the bed. Despite the haze in his mind, he flips through a thousand different possibilities in a quick second. Ankle snapping under a hard tackle, shoulder dislocated by way of a bad collision, nose dripping red from incidental contact. Outlandishly, Michael thinks of an ambulance driving onto the pitch, sirens blaring and lights flashing. He reaches for the nightstand, unplugs his second phone, and fumbles across the screen to find a livestream, any video of the match. A suspicious link on Twitter leads him to three pixels running at one frame per second.
Somehow, the reality is worse than any far-fetched horror story in his head. There are no clips of the injury, only replays of the aftermath: Manu is limp against the grass, holding his knee, and then Manu is limping off the field, unbalanced even when clutching at the support of two others. The sight jars Michael more than he had thought possible.
Amidst his blankets, with his bad leg propped up on a pillow, Michael feels as if he is floating somewhere above reality and between time, drifting out of his body back to a memory he has revisited too many times for it to be accurate anymore. The details shift once more and this is the newest iteration. Like all his dreams these nights, Michael is looking down from above at himself, but the number on the back of his kit is wrong, his hands are grasping below where it actually hurts, and the person broken on the pitch is not Michael.
It is the same injury in every way, except for where it’s not.
Michael can’t decide if this week is real, or just a cruel joke, or both. Probably whichever one is worse.
The next day, whenever Michael recovers his other phone from under the bed, he sees that the team has adequately avenged Manu with a hattrick of goals and that Manu has texted him.
gold next year
Michael doesn’t think he will ever fully understand Manu. He tries his best to translate patterns into rules, but Manu does not make it simple for him. His words are as slick as an oil spill in meaning and inflection, leaving Michael second-guessing if he will ever be fluent in this language. He is free in his affection with everyone, but there is a line he will not cross with Michael despite how tangled their web is now. Manu does not talk to him outside of the national team, which is the vast majority of the year, but it does not dampen the ease in which he pulls Michael in close whenever he is near.
Michael does not know what any of it means, only that this is how it is and he wants for more. A medal, but also a future he cannot yet fully conceptualize under the weight of his body breaking down.
Still, there is one level upon which Michael is certain they both stand on now, and it is this.
thoughts on ebs telling michael abt his 2024 euros call up that southgate promised him in 2022 when he nuked his achilles and how maybe in the quiet of the night he asks michael if he would come play for england if he was asked. not that he’s asking for real but would michael please consider this for real.
pondering abt how in 2023, at the u21 euros, somewhere in romania, after michael nuked his leg against norway and he’d cried his heart out in the treatment room after france had secured the win, in the wake of celebration, manu had found him in the darkness with a towel over his head, and he had not pitied him because manu at twenty had already missed so many games because of his hamstring, he promised michael that they would play at the olympics tgt next year, held eye contact until michael nodded with manus hand on his head before sneaking back out to the party, a future which michael could not conceptualize under the weight of his body breaking down, the idea of being whole enough for manu, for france. analyzing if michael would’ve considered ebs impossible possibility with real interest or held firm to manus one-off promise from a year ago, both of which seemed equally unlikely to manifest as true. ideas on ebs knowing michael was going to leave palace next season and wanting a chance to play for a trophy together. secretly michael hopes that the fa will make the decision for him but internally he longs for a future he cannot hold in two hands.
the fact that these timelines are real kinda kills me
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