the whistle knows my name (31597 words) by unrealcities
Fandom: Men's Football RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cesc Fàbregas/Gerard Piqué, Cesc Fàbregas/Daniella Semaan
Additional Tags: Baby Dream Team, Non-Linear Narrative, Character Study, The Sports Marriage and the Sports Divorce, No Paired Ending, I Cannot Possibly Overemphasize How Much No One Gets Together in this Fic
Summary:
“Like, when we were little kids we all wanted to play up front, right? We all wanted to be strikers and score goals-”
“You didn’t,” Leo had said, which was true enough. Cesc had decided his fate early.
But Leo had been detracting from his point. “I score goals now,” Cesc had replied, detracting from his own argument himself. “What I mean is that if Geri didn’t move on and still insisted on being the team’s leading goalscorer we wouldn’t have one of the best center-backs in the world.”
“I think that might be a bad example.”
Cesc gets divorced. He thinks he’s seen this film before.
So currently I answer to my full first name (which I usually introduce myself with) as well as two nicknames/diminutives plus my last name when people mistake it for a first name. There are two or three other nicknames I've also gone by in the past. I'm perfectly fine with this, or neutral at minimum-- I have a common name and have had to be flexible with how I'm distinguished for my whole life. I also don't feel a deep and fundamental connection of my name with my identity, though I think going by another name entirely would confuse me.
A number of friends have been appalled at me being called names I don't say are my name. Which is really weird to me, although I'd go to battle for anyone else who was getting either deadnamed or called something they didn't want. But this perspective seems surprisingly common!
How do you feel about being called something other than the name you introduce yourself with?
I think it's fun if people give me (non-derogatory) nicknames or shorten my name
I don't care if people call me something else and will answer to it
I'm mildly uncomfortable or annoyed but won't make an issue of it
I HATE being called something else and will always correct people
Literally I woke up this morning and my brain decided to do this. Daemon AU ficlet but make it Spain and also terribly self-indulgent.
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It happened to everyone, but it was still mildly vexing when people underestimated Irenea.
She wasn't fast, but she wasn't sessile, either. She wasn't loud, but she communicated fine. She couldn't really thermoregulate, but neither could Rodri's komodo dragon or Gavi's basilisk. It was just that the combination of all those things had routinely called her presence on a football pitch- and by extension, Mikel's- into question ever since they were twelve years old.
Even when they'd been younger she'd never been inclined towards the forms the other boys in Amigo favored, cats and canids and great whirling birds, swift and powerful. She'd liked reptiles, cold-blooded and considering. The occasional mustelid or raptor. But as the rest of his academy teammates had hared after the ball, sliding tackles and careless dribbles, their daemons gallivanting up and down the touchline, she'd usually just stood there, only moving as necessary. Watching. People had found it funny, until it wasn't. Until it was, in order: a career death knell, an indictment of his capabilities, an inconvenience, funny again.
"It doesn't matter when your mind goes faster than the ball," Arteta had said, but that was an all right thing for him to say. Mikel Arteta had a soul to beat champions.
But then again, Mikel Arteta had plopped him in the middle of Arsenal's front line against Real Madrid, of all teams, and in the dressing room afterwards Odda and Bukayo and Wilo and Gabriel had sprayed bucketloads of beer over him and Declan both. Irenea hadn't even turtled inwards: pleased, even though probably he'd been the only one who could tell. He'd spent an absurd amount of time washing off her carapace; the stuff was sticky. She'd practically preened the entire time.
His first day at London Colney Irenea had parked herself outside the stall he took, second farthest from the door so they wouldn't be in the way, as he showered after training. The boys had stepped carefully around her, and Odda's Arctic fox had bumped noses with her affably as Odda muttered something about accessibility, and by the following week the two stalls nearest the entrance had been widened, giant tortoise-friendly. It hadn't been an issue at Osasuna or Real Sociedad, where all too many Basque children had gone the bovine route when settling, but the sensibilities of the city of London were different.
Anyway England was far too cold for her showers to be necessary, much less pleasant. Dallas was a different matter; the wide stalls of the Emirates and London Colney would have been a welcome respite at half-time, but the feted American decadence didn't go that far. He'd made do with spraying her down with the contents of his water bottle.
"You've been in England too long," Lamine joked, unfazed by either the heat or the goallessness or the World Cup itself. The kangaroo rat peeking out from under his collar certainly looked unperturbed. In her element, Mikel thought.
"Rodri is right there," he pointed out. Admittedly Rodri's current lack of dignity could be attributed to the half he had just played. Mikel had no such excuse.
"Don't judge," Gavi said. "I'm melting. Can I have some of that? We've used up all of mine."
By we he meant him and Pedri. Ferran had taken Pedri's water bottle, and so Pedri and Gavi had shared. Pedri's marten and Gavi's basilisk were both splayed out on the dressing-room floor, attempting to be one with the cool tiled surface. Mikel shook his head, handed over the bottle, and went off to find out how big a dent they could make in their stash before they started up again.
Back on the pitch the heat was, in defiance of all logic, worse. "Tell her to stop eating the grass," Martin muttered.
Mikel looked: there were, apart from several tortoise-shaped indentations on the ground, several suspiciously chewed-up-looking grass patches in front of the bench. "It's too hot," he said, distracted. "Yours is sleeping on the cooler."
"Mine is like a tenth of the size of yours," Martin said, cheerful.
David was also distracted- or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that he and David were paying attention to the game, and everyone else was distracted- but he turned his attention to them both, concerned. "Do you need more water?"
What Mikel needed was something more fundamental than that. "Sure."
Someone procured a bucket of water from somewhere, but of course that was when Luis turned to their section of the bench and said, "Fabian, Merino, let's go."
"Go get them, Mr. Clutch," Martin said, and dropped the red panda inside the bucket.
The Spanish midfield stranglehold, Luis de la Fuente edition, was often a display of control and competence. Sometimes it was a war of attrition. From the outside the two were occasionally indistinguishable, but when you were on the pitch, you knew. Five minutes of normal time, but- and he said this in interviews, but that didn't make it any less true- Luis trusted his team. They didn't need magic, just what they already had.
Rodri took the freekick, the ball collected by Ferran Torres for a through-pass, but even before that Mikel knew it was time. Somewhere off on the sidelines, his soul had already started moving.
"We knew!" Martin crowed in his ear, after. How Mikel could hear him over the din was a mystery. "When she started running! We knew!"
Running, Mikel thought, was a bit of an optimistic description. But he could not stop grinning as he approached Irenea where she waited for him at the corner of the pitch, a whole host of creatures clinging to her shell, shrike and marten and owl and sopping wet red panda. They rounded the flag together.
idk I think maybe 2000s/10s feminism talked too much about “unrealistic beauty standards for women” that people forgot “beauty standards for women” is already fucked up
