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2021-09-09
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perchance to dream here

Summary:

Beard’s new pub is a pretty okay place.

 

Cons: No Mae. Bad pie. An old man named Alistair who always wants to talk.

 

Pros: Jane hates this place and has said as much a dozen times. Jane hates this place and is too proud to try to find him here. Jane hates this place and that’s good enough for him.

Notes:

Title courtesy of Coach Beard courtesy of Shakespeare. :)

The timing is a little weird for this one; it's written after 2x7 aired, but it's set in an imagined period the summer after s2 ends. Therefore, it contains speculative, unproven details about various in-progress plot points in s2, but only contains actual spoilers from 2x7 and earlier. I've had this idea for a bit and decided I really wanted to go on and write it before Rupert and Bex presumably make an s2 appearance...and before Beard's story progresses.

While Bex/Beard is the primary relationship explored in this story, there is some background pre(ish)-relationship Ted/Rebecca as well.

Content warning for mentions of past emotional abuse. Please take care when reading, but the main characters in this story are in a safe space.

I hope you enjoy it, and whether you did or not I'd love to hear what you think!

Work Text:

Beard’s new pub is a pretty okay place.

Cons: No Mae. Bad pie. An old man named Alistair who always wants to talk.

Pros: Jane hates this place and has said as much a dozen times. Jane hates this place and is too proud to try to find him here. Jane hates this place and that’s good enough for him.

Beard tells himself he’s allowed to go back to the Crown and Anchor only when his immune system has built up enough Jane-resistant antibodies. He’s already blocked her number and had a very uncomfortable conversation with his seventy-year-old male landlord about why he needed to change his locks immediately. He’s spent half a day at the Apple store disentangling from all the digital intimacy. He doesn’t open the street entrance to his flat without checking through the peephole first. He’s donated all the hats and clothes Jane gave him to Oxfam. Jane’s only shown up at Keeley’s house twice, and both Keeley and Ted are certain she’ll lose interest soon—Ted hasn’t seen her at the C&A once in the last few weeks. Then again, Beard isn’t there at all, and Ted’s there less often himself these days. Sometimes he joins Beard at the new pub for a pint and anything that isn’t pie. But while the season has ended, therapy has not, and walking the Green alone is the only thing that clears Ted’s mind. Sometimes Ted stays outdoors in the early summer air until it’s nearly time for bed. He texts Beard at the end of those nights: Home. Night, neighbor. Beard always texts back a Pub or a Home too or a Spotify link to a new favorite song.

When Bex Mannion shows up at the new pub alone with a baby carrier slung over her shoulder, wearing sunglasses until she’s all the way inside, the sight of her is so unexpected that Beard almost doesn’t register who she is.

Ted would’ve noticed her the moment she walked through the door—he’s mentioned Bex a few times in recent months, wondering how she was doing, wondering if news of a separation would hit the press sometime soon. When Ted started uttering opinions about other people again, right around the time Richmond got promoted and Beard broke up with Jane for good, he explained that he didn’t believe in hell but that part of him kinda hoped people like Rupert and Jane did. Hoped that, as people like Rupert and Jane went about their days, there was a small, bothersome part of them that wondered if they were headed for the fire.

But right now? Ted is in Kansas for a few weeks, and was already there when news of the Mannion separation did reach the press, and the pub is crowded tonight but Beard arrived early and has a table all to himself. When Bex has ordered her pint and no seats have opened up, Beard does the right thing and finds her eyes and motions her over to his table. It’s this or another night of half-ignoring Alistair.

“Thanks,” Bex says as she sits down. She sets the baby carrier right on the table and immediately lifts her beer to take a first sip. Beard steals a look at her hand. There’s a tan line where her wedding ring used to be.

Beard figures he’d better make sure she knows that he knows her. “What brings you to the Goose and Gander, Ms....Mannion—?”

Bex rolls her eyes. “Still Mannion. But next month I get Parker back. Coach—”

“Beard.”

“Beard,” she repeats. “Right. And this is Elliott.”

He doesn’t know what comes over him, but he leans forward in his seat, getting enough height to be able to find Elliott’s tiny hand and shake it. “Nice meetin’ ya,” he says, glancing from Elliott to Bex. Her eye roll deepens, but she smiles.

“He’s adorable,” Beard says. He finds Bex’s eyes again. Decides to take a gamble. “Hear his dad’s a real prick, though.”

The gamble pays off; Bex’s shoulders relax right away.

“My stupid friends—ex-friends—all hate this place,” Bex says, and when Beard looks confused, she adds, “If you still wanted to know what brought me to the Goose and Gander?”

“Go on.”

“I’ve got old friends everywhere, and it blows? But I’m sick of sitting around my flat with Elliott all night after working my shit job all day? So I figured I’d try the place all my friends hate about as much as they hate me.”

“Mm.”

Bex sits up a little straighter, like someone who just remembered she’s hot and is supposed to ask men questions.

Beard decides to give his reason before she can force out an inane conversation starter. “I’m here because my emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend hates this place and I’m scared I’ll see her if I go anywhere else.”

Bex raises her nearly full glass. Beard raises his, which is nearly empty.

“To leaving,” Bex says.

“To getting the fuck outta dodge.”

They clink.

It takes only a week of very intentional pub meet-ups for Bex to become the least complicated relationship of Beard’s life. The turning point happens when Bex hands over Elliott, too fussy for his carrier that night, and asks Beard to hold him while she goes to the bathroom. He hasn’t held a baby since Henry Lasso was a baby, and now he feels like he should be afraid of the five minutes of responsibility, or should start praying to the social gods that Rupert and Bex Mannion’s extremely not-evil spawn doesn’t start screaming until Bex comes back. But instead of screaming, Elliott shifts against the crook of his arm and falls asleep. Asleep, he seems heavier than he did a minute earlier. It’s a comforting weight. It makes Beard feel like a piece of paper secured to a well-made clipboard, or the first person to ride in a car with cross-shoulder seat belts. Safety first.

When Bex returns, she doesn’t take Elliott back. She looks thoughtfully at Beard holding her son before breaking into a smile. “Well, we can’t waste this sleep,” she says sweetly. “I’ll order us another round.”

And suddenly, in that moment, it occurs to him that Beard-and-Bex-and-Elliott feels remarkably less complicated than Beard’s mother, lost to Q. Less complicated than his father, a man so quiet he makes Beard seem positively loquacious. Less complicated than Ted, who will always be his best friend, no matter what, and who’s occupied more of Beard’s thoughts over the years than anyone, but whose transition from communicating almost entirely in allusions to sharing actual thoughts has left him a little rough around the edges lately. Less complicated than every person he’s ever coached with, played with, trained with. Less complicated than every dancer, chess fiend, bartender, preschool teacher, hairdresser, or abuser he’s ever slept with.

Bex herself is plenty complex, of course. She doesn’t know how to play chess and seems almost preemptively angry at the idea that Beard might want to teach her; he tells her it’s a turn-on she doesn’t play and leaves it at that. She’s an office manager at a spa and it’s a boring job but she’s pretty sure one of the estheticians is embezzling money and she wants to stick around to find out. Rupert’s new hobby is buying burner phones and using them to send her threatening and sometimes disgusting messages, just vague enough that it’s impossible to prove it’s him, and she tries to brush it off but each time it happens it unsettles her. Unsettles Beard, too. Bex is learning to be a mother without her own mother, without her friends, without any of the people who could’ve talked sense into her or stuck up for her but didn’t. Bex is complex. But it’s the simplest thing in the world to lean in for a first kiss outside the pub, or to stay up too late talking only when one of them has something to say. To accept when she invites him in to watch a movie, and to smile at the way she tucks her sock feet underneath her on the couch.

Beard tries to complicate it. He tries to poke it and prod it and make it strange and anticipate what might become strange about it in the future.

He hands her a coffee from the stand at the farmer’s market and asks, “Is it ethical for an assistant manager in the Premier League to date a woman who owns three percent of his club?”

Bex shrugs and adjusts Elliott’s placement in the fabric sling she and Beard trade off wearing. She takes a sip of coffee before answering. “I’m hardly the first Richmond owner named Rebecca who’s a bit iffy on how those details are supposed to work.”

Beard wonders how Bex knows about what happened with Rebecca and Sam in the spring. There hasn’t been a whiff of the scandal in the papers, and he may never understand how they managed to dodge that particular bullet. He could ask her how she knows, but he doesn’t, and she doesn’t say.

“I’ve been with literally dozens of women and three men,” Beard says over a mediocre bolognese, homemade right in Bex’s kitchen. “Sometimes for one night, sometimes a few months.” He thinks of Jane, how all the ons between the offs added up. “Sometimes longer.”

“Wow,” Bex says. “Impressive.” She doesn’t sound particularly impressed. She does drift someplace else for a second, though, and when she refocuses she asks, “Are you a cheater?”

“Never,” Beard says honestly. He doesn’t cheat. Not in chess or sport or love and lust.

“And are you riddled with disease?”

“I get STI-tested every two months, no matter what. Clean bill of health.” He salutes, and immediately regrets it.

Bex looks at him like she thinks he’s the biggest dork in the entire world, albeit a dork without syphilis or chlamydia.

Occasionally Bex does a little prodding of her own. “My whole life, people have said I was too quiet,” Bex whispers into his chest, curled up against him on the couch one night.

“Mm,” Beard says.

Bex bursts out laughing, but she speaks again a minute later. “And do you think I’m too quiet?”

“Nope.”

Until now, Beard has never waited more than thirty seconds into a relationship to have sex, but he’s dated Bex for two weeks and slept in her bed several times, and—to rely on the American pasttime for a useful shorthand—they’ve barely rounded second base. He and Bex might be quiet weirdos who love quiet, but he definitely has to talk to her about it.

“You know—” he starts to say, projecting his voice from the bed to the open bathroom door. Bex’s electric toothbrush starts up right as he does, so he waits exactly two long minutes to resume the sentence. “You know,” he says again, and Bex turns to face him after she rinses her mouth, leaning against the sink with her hands gripping the edge of the countertop. She wears a white t-shirt and little blue sleep shorts and she looks so beautiful that his mouth waters. “I don’t want to pressure you, but I’m down for whatever. Whenever you want.”

Bex tenses. Shoulders tight, smile fixed. Braced for cruelty, Beard realizes. Cruelty and ultimatums and feeling like so much less than beautiful. Like a fuckable speck of dirt. “I’m still getting my body back,” Bex says.

“Huh,” Beard says lightly. “Looks like you’ve got one to me.”

Bex swallows. “Yeah, a fucking weird stretchy mum one.”

Beard weighs his options. He could tell her that at least ten of the women he’s slept with were mothers, could tell her he loves stretch marks and scars and curves, all the stories of skin. He could tell her he’s the luckiest man in the world to get to be with her, and that he’d feel that way even if they never round third base and slide into home. He could tell her he’s pretty sure the look on her face bears resemblance to a look Jane used to put on his.

“I bet you were beautiful the day you had Elliott,” he says. “And I don’t know if anyone said it to you that day, but you deserved to hear it then, and I wish I could’ve been there to say it.” He thinks about the tattoos she hasn’t seen yet. His tendency to stub his toes. The appalling pale of his torso. “I bet you were beautiful the day before you had him, and the day after, but all I can do is look at you now and tell you now.”

Bex nods but doesn’t speak.

“There’s no pressure,” Beard says. “Truly. If you wanna wait because it’s right for you, that’s—that’s what we’ll do. But you’re beautiful, and there’s nothing you need to change for me.”

When Bex climbs into bed next to him, she turns out the light right away. Just when he thinks he’s gone too far, said way too much, applied pressure despite telling her there was none, she scoots closer and kisses his cheek right next to his ear. “In a few weeks I’ll probably tell you how much I love you,” she murmurs.

“I’ll say it right back.”

She runs her hand over his chest, over his t-shirt, pushing her fingertips up until she reaches just past the collar and onto bare skin. “Good.” She inhales. “And I think—I think we should kind of work up to that.”

He reaches out in the dark, wondering if she can feel his heart thudding with relief, nudges her face closer to his. “Works for me,” he says, and kisses her goodnight.

“I’ve never felt this way before,” Beard tells Ted the moment as he’s back from Kansas. Almost literally the moment he’s back—they’re having the conversation at the side of Ted’s bed while he pulls dirty laundry from his suitcase and puts it in the hamper. The words are a total cliché, but they don’t feel that way when he says them. He can’t help it; he really hasn’t ever felt this way before.

Once Ted gets over the shock of Bex Mannion, Rupert’s ex, the woman who, through no fault of her own, turned Rebecca into Old Rebecca in the papers, he’s happy about the news if a little worried. “It’s like that scene in—” Ted cuts himself off and takes a deep breath. “Man, that is great,” he says, trying again. “But I think a short relationship”—a Beard-style relationship, Ted means—“could really break her heart while she’s going through a divorce and dealing with her kid.”

“Not gonna be a short relationship,” Beard says, and Ted turns down his mouth as if to say I’m impressed.

He wants to ask Ted what it felt like to become Henry’s father. If he became a father—spiritually, not factually—when Michelle was pregnant or if it didn’t sink in until the day Henry was born or even later. If there was an incident, an exact moment he remembers. He can’t wait to figure it out, with Bex, of course, and with Elliott as soon as Elliott can talk, but also with Ted. He can’t wait, but he looks at the lines around Ted’s eyes and the sleep creases in his face and realizes he can and should wait until Ted has at least a day or two of distance from Kansas.

Ted is in their office when Bex texts and Beard runs out to the parking lot to meet her and Elliott, but now that he’s led them back there with Elliot strapped to his chest and Bex’s hand in his, the office is empty. Rather than embark on a wild goose chase, he calls Ted’s cell.

Ted answers on the first ring. “I’m in Rebecca’s office,” he says. “Y’all can come up.” More quietly: “She knows.”

There’s a lot that Rebecca knows, thanks to Ted. Since his return to the UK he’s been talking to her about Beard and Bex, about the baby, about everything. Listening to the pain and translating it for Beard, somehow without saying too much. And while the plan tonight is for Ted and Beard to give Bex and Elliott a quick club tour before a triumphant return to the Crown and Anchor, Beard knows that on some level, Ted’s been hoping all week to figure out a way for Rebecca to meet Bex again, and meet the baby. Bex has known it might happen this evening, though they couldn’t be sure until now. They haven’t spent as much time worrying about it as they might have—they’re too busy fucking, frankly. Too busy kissing in the mornings and rushing out for work, exhausted but coasting on happiness.

The light in Rebecca’s office is a golden bath, and for a few seconds they all stand awkwardly in it. Then Ted snaps into action, offering Bex a quick hug before taking in Beard and Elliott for the first time. There’s a look in his eyes like it’s Beard’s wedding day or graduation day—or like something better, like he’s finally seen for himself the way his oldest friend might be a father.

Ted takes Elliott from the sling as soon as Bex offers. He loves babies, and he’s good with them—Elliott fusses a bit during the transfer, but once he’s settled, Ted has him smiling. “Should we sit a little before dinner?” he asks, and everyone turns down Rebecca’s offer of drinks because they’re about to go for drinks anyway. Ted sits at one end of the big sectional sofa, and Rebecca, who’s been politely smiley but very quiet, sits right next to him, so close that Beard's going to have to ask Ted later what else he and Rebecca have been talking about since he got back from Kansas. Beard and Bex settle in at a right angle from the others.

Beard and Bex are quiet, and they like that about each other, and being quiet means Beard can hear Ted when he asks Rebecca if she wants to hold the baby. Ted refers to Elliott as “Bex’s baby." Not Rupert’s. Not a Mannion. Bex’s baby, Elliott Parker.

“All right,” Rebecca says, and she holds out her arms in the tentative manner of a person aware they're about to accept something so precious they’re convinced they’ll drop it. When Ted sets the baby in Rebecca’s arms, he puts his arm across the back of the couch, then thinks better of it and rests it across her shoulders. His next words are even quieter, but Beard’s been listening to Ted for years. Ted could mouth something from across a packed, deafeningly noisy stadium and he would be able to tell exactly what he’d said. And so Ted watches Rebecca hold the baby, an unreadable expression on her face, and Beard hears him when he whispers “We all love you” right in her ear.

They don’t visit long. But when everyone stands up to get ready to go to the pub, Rebecca asks—at a normal volume, so everyone can hear—if there’s room for one more.