Bad Things Happen Bingo #2: Sports Injury
(What a great prompt and a perfect excuse to bring an old universe out of mothballs! This is an alternate reality in which Canada is good at soccer and has its own, pretty decent professional league; Kathy Fox is the first woman ever to sign for a Canadian professional men’s team, and Patrick Hatley is her childhood friend and rival)
(There should be a picture of my bingo card here, but tumblr won’t let me do that right now, so I’ll have to add it in later)
"You all right, Fox? You're walking kinda funny."
Nothing brings Katherine Fox down to earth quicker than having someone worry about her. She straightens her back and nods, adjusting her gait. "I'm fine. I think I slept funny." Her teammate gives her a dubious look.
"You slept funny on your ankle? Are you a flamingo?"
Laughter ripples through the Royal Windsor side of the tunnel- on the opposite side, the Quebec City players remain studiously silent, all but Patrick Hatley, who snickers. "It's called nerves, Fox!" he calls across the gap.
He looks just as relaxed as always, grinning that same dumb grin with his canine teeth sticking out, rocking on the balls of his feet with his hands on his hips like he's king of the world.
"Whatever helps you feel better about yourself, Hatley," she replies blandly, and he smiles and nods like that was exactly his intention. Not nerves, that much she's sure of. Kathy Fox doesn't get nerves. Her left ankle may be hurting, and it may have been hurting ever since she woke up this morning, but it's definitely got nothing to do with nerves.
After all, she's been looking forward to this game for months.
The atmosphere is already hot as they walk out onto the field. The chants are in French, of course, and therefore unintelligible to Kathy, but the venom behind the words is a universal language. Forty-eight thousand people (the attendance hasn't been announced yet, but this game could never be anything but a sellout) bounce in unison, rattling the old stadium's metal bones right down to the field. The away support is impossible to miss, sequestered as they are in the north corner with three rows of empty seats between them and the home fans, and they're doing their best to be heard above the chaos.
The perfect atmosphere, in other words, for a late-season battle for first place. Kathy soaks it in, smiling, as the rituals get underway. She shakes hands with Quebec City's captain, calls the coin toss, and kicks off under a hail of boos.
"We're gonna psyche them out," Coach Leo had said in the locker room. "Start strong and fast. If we can dominate possession for a spell, keep them on the back foot, the crowd will get antsy. Score first, and they might just turn on their own team."
This was a well-documented phenomenon with Quebec City's supporters.
"We are not playing for a draw here. A draw will be the same as a loss, got that? They'll still be ahead of us, and their run-in is easier than ours. We're attacking."
Kathy doesn't mind that he was looking right at her for most of that speech. She's the captain, after all.
And she gets Coach's gameplan off to a good start less than five minutes in, sending number seven down the wing with a daring through ball. The crowd goes nearly silent until he blasts into the side netting, then express their relief with a shower of sarcastic applause.
Then suddenly they're cheering again, louder than ever, as a series of impressive one-time passes split the Windsor midfield all the way to Kathy. Her sore ankle almost lets her down, but she puts on a burst of speed to dispossess her Quebec counterpart.
He looks surprised, as they so often do. Sometimes it's nice to be a woman in a man's world.
"Don't wear out your stumpy little legs, Fox," says Hatley as he positions himself for the throw-in. He'd had a good run on goal, but he doesn't look too fazed by the lost chance.
"Don't waste your breath, Hatley," she replies.
He runs for the ball when it's thrown in and bounces a pass off his number ten. Dragging the ball through a wall of defenders isn't exactly his strong suit, so Kathy is somewhat taken aback to see him dodge past three of her teammates and suddenly find himself one-on-one with the keeper. The roar of the crowd builds to a peak; he goes for the bottom right.
It's a brilliant dive, and it just barely deflects the shot around the post.
The roar diminishes only a little.
"That was sloppy," she admonishes the defenders as they arrange themselves for the corner. They're all young, and the youngest is only nineteen- Akela Donovan from Toronto. He looks sheepish.
"Forgot he was fast."
"Don't forget again."
He nods earnestly.
The corner comes in high, with a dramatic curve. Patrick "Hat Trick" Hatley jumps for it, Windsor's goalie leaps to catch it, and three bodies collide in midair. The ball trickles away from the goal line, and Kathy lunges for it, clearing it away downfield.
"Fucker! That was a foul!"
Not Hatley's voice; he was never the type.
"Penalty!"
She backs away, not wanting to be associated in any way with the knot of Quebec players crowding into the referee or the knot of Windsor players trying to drag them away. Instead she glances towards the jumbotron, trying to get a sense for what just happened. Did Windsor's number four drag Hatley down? Was it the goalie? There's no good view, and the ref is unimpressed.
Play resumes. The crowd is livid; the curses thrown by the spectators in the fieldside seats can easily be made out through the roar. Hard to say if the gameplan is working yet; they're definitely provoking a reaction, at the very least.
The pain in her ankle is getting worse- now it's a deep, biting ache, and it's getting distracting, which is dangerous. One absolutely egregious pass to no one makes her suddenly wonder whether she should ask to be subbed off.
*Give it five minutes*, she decides, gritting her teeth.
It's an end-to-end game, much more so than Coach Leo wanted- he's getting red-faced on the touchline, and Kathy knows that at the next stoppage he's going to ask her what the hell is going on.
Hatley, on the other hand, is having one of his best games of the season, splitting their defense open with ease, and the frustration on her teammates' faces is starting to get to Kathy as well. It just figures, that he's playing like this while she's flailing.
She should really see it coming, what's about to happen. But she doesn't.
It's the thirty-sixth minute, four minutes into the five she's allowed herself. Her ankle doesn't want to bear her weight; she forces it to, exploding forward to beat her Quebec counterpart to a high ball, and makes what must be her best pass of the night to her number six. But his touch is poor, and the ball is gone from in front of him before he has a chance to recover.
Everything happens very quickly. Windsor's right fullback is backing up, trying to anticipate the Quebec winger's run, but the opposition player suddenly stops in his tracks and delivers a superb cross.
To fucking Patrick Hatley.
With a clear run at goal.
Akela Donovan is the only one near. "Go! Go!" Kathy screams, uselessly, sprinting after them. The crowd is on its feet- the stadium is vibrating- Donovan is three feet behind, he's not gonna make it, and Hatley is turning for the shot.
Donovan lunges in with both feet. Patrick goes down like a sack of potatoes, all six feet five inches of him, and Kathy stumbles in her tracks. The pain in her ankle is gone.
Her heart drops. She runs.
In the silence that's descended over the stadium, two sounds can suddenly be heard with terrible clarity. One of them is Akela Donovan, babbling in incoherent horror, and the other is Patrick Hatley, screaming.
She gets there first, falling to her knees beside him. "Patrick!"
"Hh... Kath..." His body is twisted, his fingers digging into the grass, but he opens his eyes to look at her. His gaze flicks downward.
"No, don't look at it," she gasps, grabbing his hand. "Look at me."
It's hard enough for her to see it, to see that brilliant right foot twisted to the side, looking so defiled, so wrong. And the blood... it's a testament to the amount of pain he's in that he obeys her immediately. She holds his gaze, and his hand, which clutches hers in a vise grip.
There are people all around them now. A voice is yelling for a stretcher. Kathy tries to smile. She wants to punch someone. "It's fine. It's not that bad. You... you should be ashamed of yourself, diving like that."
He tries to smile back. "You're... the one who... fell for it," he manages between breaths.
For a second she can almost believe that he'd fake this just to mess with her. Then the physios are there, and she's pushed aside, and Patrick just barely manages not to scream again as they lift him onto the stretcher.
The sound that comes out instead is almost as bad.
There's no faking that.
It takes Kathy a moment after she stands up to realize that Akela Donovan is already gone. She wonders if anyone spoke to him. She wonders if she can trust herself to do it.
All the spirit has been sucked out of the stadium; the game finishes dismally, with a 0-0 draw. As bitter a point as any Kathy's had in her career. She goes through the motions of sportsmanship afterwards, feeling aimlessly angry and very much like she shouldn't talk to Akela Donovan.
But there's no getting around it; he approaches her in the locker room once everyone else has left.
"Fuck, Fox, I'm sorry," he says, and the misery in his voice and on his face seems genuine. "I fucked everything up. I-"
"Don't apologize to me, Donovan. I'm not the one whose career might be over."
His face goes gray. "Over...?"
"Yeah. Or shortened. Missing a large chunk, at the very least. You-" She can hear the venom starting to seep into her words, and she cuts them off, waving her hand. "Now's not a good time to be talking to me. I know you didn't do it on purpose. Go on, get moving."
He does, quickly, and she follows.
The verdict comes through only a day later; Akela Donovan is suspended the rest of the season. Four games. They'll miss him, but Quebec will miss Hatley more.
She calls Patrick in the morning.
"Apparently it's pretty gnarly," he tells her with forced nonchalance. "The bone went right through the skin. Just popped right... ugh, fuck."
"You can't even describe it," she teases, grinning.
"Take off."
"How are you, though?" This is the loudest that she'll ever voice her concern. Patrick clears his throat.
"Well, uh, it hurts." He pauses, as if to let this sink in, before continuing. "I'm just trying not to think about it too much, because I won't know if I'm out for six months or forever until after the surgery. So until then, why worry?"
It's clear from his voice that he is worrying. "Shit."
"It's the fucking worst."
A commiserative silence fills the air for a few moments.
"I'll come and visit tomorrow," Kathy says.
"While the rest of your team flies home to Windsor? Don't be stupid, you'll miss training. You're the captain."
"We've got a bye week anyway. I'll get another hotel."
"Well, okay," he concedes quickly. She almost laughs, but it occurs to her that he might not even be aware of what just happened. She lets it go.
"I'm gonna eat breakfast now. I'll see you soon."
"Yeah, see you soon, Kathy."
No more than a minute after she ends the call, her phone is ringing again. Donovan, says the call display. She has to admire the kid's guts, at least.
She answers it. "Donovan. What's going on?"
"I'm doing what you told me to."
"Oh yeah?" She can't remember what she told him to do. Fuck off, maybe?
"Yeah. I'm going to apologize. I just thought you would want to know." There's a note of uncertainty in his voice; this is definitely new territory for him. She almost feels sorry for the kid.
"That's good. Good luck." It's tempting to tell him not to expect too much, but she knows he's not stupid; he must have come to that conclusion already.
However, she does take one precaution; once he has hung up, she texts Patrick.
F: Expect a possibly unwelcome visitor at some point today
H: What, you're arriving early?
F: Donovan wants to come say sorry
H: Oh
H: All right
She sighs as she puts the phone down. She's scared- on her childhood friend's behalf, and in general, a sort of all-encompassing dread. Was it wrong for her to put on a cheerful face, to banter with him like nothing was wrong, when she's this afraid? And if she's this afraid, what must he be feeling?
She slips the phone into her pocket and reaches for her shoes.