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It’s a perfectly normal day, the dressing room bustling and full of laughter, when Jamie realizes he can’t breathe.
They’re celebrating Goodman’s birthday after a particularly grueling training session, because in Roy’s eyes a birthday is no excuse to get lazy. To his credit, as soon as training was called for the day Roy hadn’t let out a single complaint as Will rolled in a cake and someone started playing music obnoxiously loud. It was proper fun. The team had been working extra hard since making the Champions league and they were overdue for some lighthearted fun.
Even though Roy seemed to be in a lenient mood Jamie had waited until the man’s back was turned before he pounced on a slice of the cake. Even though Jamie was about ninety percent sure that Roy wouldn’t kick up a fuss about him violating his meal plan like everyone else, he had a habit of giving Jamie a particularly judgemental kind of stare that Jamie did not want to endure today, even if it was pretty hot. And if he moved to hide himself partially behind Sam’s body after getting his slice, who cared? Jamie has been working his arse off all week, and he deserved to enjoy a slice of cake without Roy and his eyebrows watching him like a hawk. The cake was fucking delicious, topped with some kind of peanut butter frosting that Goodman swore was the best thing he’d ever tasted. He wasn’t wrong.
After eating his cake Jamie had settled in against the dressing room cubbies, Sam and Dani on either side of him. The two men were currently engaged in a high spirited discussion of the different food from their home countries, and Jamie was more than happy to just sit and listen to them talk. He felt the pulsing of the music reverberate through the walls, the vibrations tingling through his back and shoulders.
He watched as his teammates laughed and messed around the dressing rooms. Jamie was observing the headlock that Isaac currently had Colin in and was considering whether he should go and intervene when he felt his skin begin to get unnaturally hot. His arms itched, and Jamie tried to subtly scratch at them through the long sleeves of his shirt. It was probably just a reaction to the new body wash he had gotten. It had been a recommendation from Keeley from a brand they both loved, meant to be a killer exfoliator. Seems like it didn’t agree with him, Jamie could just jump in the shower as soon as he gets home and bum the rest off to Keeley. All he had to do was try not to ruin Goodman’s party by scratching his skin off in the next hour. Easy enough.
Of course that was when Jamie became aware that it was getting harder to breathe. So distracted by the mental imagery of tearing off a layer of his skin, he hadn’t realized that it was taking considerably more effort to take in air. It felt like there was an invisible hand pressing around his windpipe, slowly shrinking his airways smaller and smaller.
“Jamie? Are you okay?” A familiar voice broke through Jamie’s growing panic. He looked up into Sam’s worried face. There was a weird noise, it sounded sort of like when Phoebe was determined to learn to play the harmonica and spent the first few days huffing and puffing into the instrument without making much of a sound. Except this time the sound was coming from Jamie, a horrible kind of wheezing as he gasped for breath.
“Sam-” Jamie forced out, “I can’t-” He cut off, gesturing towards his throat. Panic was rising in his chest, it was getting harder and harder to breath, feeling like he was trying to take in air through a straw. Jamie slipped from the bench to the floor, Sam’s hands shooting out in a failed attempt to halt his fall. Jamie felt a bit boneless, like he was nothing but a gasping sack of flesh, his skin burning.
Above him he could hear Dani shout something indistinguishable, and the music cut out. Jamie let out another wheezing breath, Sam swimming in the corner of his vision. It sort of felt like he was deflating, Jamie thought with a bizarre note of hilarity. He might be dying, he might die on the fucking floor of the Richmond dressing room, sounding like a deflating balloon and wishing he could tear the itchy skin right off of his face.
Suddenly it felt like there were a million hands on Jamie, running over his heated skin, surrounding him where he sat on the floor. It was already hard enough to breathe, and having a mob of teammates overwhelming him wasn’t helping one fucking bit. He tried to shake off the hands, but his limbs felt separated from his body and outside of his control.
“Everybody fucking move !” Roy’s voice shouted through the dressing room, and Jamie almost melted into a puddle of relief.
The hands all vanished and Roy appeared in their place, falling to his knees in a way that made the part of Jamie’s brain that was still capable of conscious thought wince. The man was going to regret that later when his knee was fucking killing him. Strong, calloused hands gripped Jamie’s cheeks, providing a cool relief from the relentless burn of his skin. Roy’s frantic worried eyes met his, and Jamie almost wanted to laugh at the cartoonish way Roy’s eyebrows scrunched in concern. His mouth was moving, making words that Jamie couldn’t decipher, but the invisible hand on Jamie’s throat was getting tighter. He reaches up to grasp Roy’s wrists and he can feel the other man’s pulse hammering through his palms. Jamie thinks about cracking a joke about Roy being careful about raising his heart rate because of heart attacks, being a grandad and all that, but decides he should maybe use his dwindling air in a better way. The invisible hand tightens, and Jamie is overwhelmed with a heightened sense of panic.
“C-can’t breathe” Jamie gasps, “Hurts.”
Roy turns and shouts something over his shoulder before turning back to face Jamie. His mouth keeps moving and Jamie can’t catch a single word, but the hand that slides from his cheek and into his hair is gentle.
The corners of Jamie’s vision begin to darken, and it feels like his eyelids are being weighed down by anchors. All Jamie wants now is to close his eyes and make all of this go away, but every time he shuts his eyes Roy gives him a violent shake, which is really fucking rude if you ask Jamie. He’s heard of shaken baby syndrome, and he isn’t sure if adults can get it but at the rate Roy’s going with jostling Jamie from side to side like a ragdoll, they’re about to find the fuck out. If the invisible hand grasping Jamie’s throat that kind of reminds him of his father would just let up for one second, Jamie could tell Roy to cut it out. One of the team medics flies through the dressing room and drops beside Roy right as Jamie loses the battle with the growing darkness. There’s a chorus of loud shouting around him, and then Jamie is gone.
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Jamie wakes up hours later in a hospital bed, and the first thing he notices is that he can breathe again. The second thing he wonders, as he looks around the sterile white room without a person in sight is whether or not he did die in the fucking dressing room after all. But then he spots the IV in his arm and thinks it would be pretty weird if the first thing that happened when you died was to get pumped up with drugs, so hospital it is then.
A further investigation of his situation finds that Jamie has one of those breathing tube things in his nose, like Hazel Grace in The Fault in Our Stars. It makes his nose itch a bit, and Jamie is considering how much trouble he’d be in if he removed it when an older nurse wanders into his room.
“Oh good sweetheart, you’re awake!”
Jamie tries to reply but all that comes out of his mouth is a dry croak. A cup of water is held to his lips, and Jamie is guided through a few careful sips. His body feels weird, like it's been sucked dry of all of its energy. It feels sort of like what Jamie would imagine a tube of toothpaste does after it's been squeezed out and emptied. He’s allowed to drink half of the cup of water before the nurse pulls it away.
“What happened?” Jamie asks, finally managing to find his voice.
“You’ve had a bit of a nasty allergic reaction, darling.”
Jamie blinks, confused. What?
“But I’m not allergic to anything? How would that have happened?”
The nurse, Marie, as she informs Jamie, explains that he is in fact allergic to something, peanuts and tree nuts. Which just makes Jamie even more confused because he’s been eating them all of his life and never had any problems before. Marie tells him that it's very rare, but sometimes adults can develop allergies later in life, and it seems like today Jamie’s body decided to wake up and make sure he never had another peanut butter sandwich for the rest of his life.
“Well that’s just fucking stupid.” Jamie complains, and Marie just laughs at him fondly. She reminds him a bit of his grandmum, with her messy gray hair and big laugh.
“It is, isn’t it.” Marie agrees, and Jamie likes her even more. He watches as Marie goes about checking his vitals, even shining a flashlight in his mouth to take a look down his throat. The swelling has gone down, but it’s still a bit sore and will be for a few more hours at least. “You know your boyfriend has been beside himself for hours, working himself up into a right state worrying about you. He only just got convinced to leave for a few minutes by one of your friends.” Marie says casually as she writes something down on the chart at the end of Jamie’s bed.
“My boyfriend?” Jamie asks, utterly baffled.
“The lad with the eyebrows and terrible frown.”
“Roy’s here?” Jamie looks about, as if Roy might have been lurking in the corner all this time. He spots a familiar leather jacket slung over one of the chairs beside his bed. It sends something shooting through Jamie’s heart. The idea that Roy had been waiting here with him while Jamie was dead to the world, waiting for him to wake up. It’s a level of care that Jamie is unfamiliar with outside of his Mum and makes his eyes sting.
“Been a right terror he has.” Marie says, oblivious to Jamie’s inner turmoil, “Stomping about the waiting room and shouting at the nurses until they got you stable and he could see you. Then he was fussing about every time anyone came into the room to do anything, wouldn’t leave your side. One of your other friends, a nice blonde girl, came and dragged him out of the room to get some food. I’ll go see if I can find him, why don’t I?”
“Y-yeah, okay. Thank you.” Jamie twists his hands in his blanket, a bout of nerves suddenly making themselves known in his stomach. Roy’s here. Roy’s been waiting here with Jamie, worrying about him by the sounds of it. Jamie isn’t sure what to do with that.
Lately there’s been a shift in their relationship. They were already best friends, already spent a ridiculous amount of time together between their extra training and work at the club. And somewhere in the midst of all of that they’ve started hanging out when it's got nothing to do with the team or football. Roy making Jamie breakfast after early training, inviting him over to watch trash telly in the evenings or have a beer. Asking him along when he’s taking Phoebe to the zoo or other outings, walking beside Jamie and letting him spew out facts that he’s learned about wherever they’re going, making the appropriate noises at the right times and even asking Jamie questions.
There’s an intimacy there that had never been there before, and it made Jamie both incredibly happy and utterly terrified. Neither of them had discussed anything yet, there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that they’d get there when they got there, just enjoying the good thing that had formed in the place of a previously turbulent relationship. And the truth was that Jamie had never felt like this for anyone before, not even Keeley, and that scared the shit out of him.
He wanted Roy more than anything he had ever wanted in his life. Nothing made him feel as happy or settled in his own skin than when it was just Jamie and Roy sitting shoulder to thigh on Roy’s fancy couch, making fun of whatever trashy reality show they had settled on for the night. But Jamie had learned long ago that caring for someone so deeply also made it really fucking easy for that person to hurt you. A small, irrational part of Jamie was terrified that this might have ruined everything for them. That Roy might storm in here and yell at Jamie for being such an idiot for eating that stupid cake, and not want to have anything else to do with Jamie anymore except for training and the club.
Right as Jamie is preparing to spiral into a puddle of doubts and anxiety, Roy bursts through the door of Jamie’s room, the door slamming into the wall with a bang that practically makes Jamie leap out of his skin.
Roy, quite frankly, looks like shit. His clothes are disheveled, his hair wild like he had spent the past few hours running his fingers through it. There’s relief, heartbreakingly apparent on his face when he sees Jamie awake, and Jamie feels his breath catch in his throat.
For a moment they stay in place, simply drinking the sight of each other in. Roy’s eyes scan Jamie up and down, and Jamie feels tempted to count out his fingers and toes, just to prove he’s all in one piece. The frantic look on Roy’s face begins to ebb, and the silence grows heavy. Roy seems to be doing his best impression of a store manakin, standing stock still and staring right at Jamie, his arms ever so far out from his body, like he might combust if he touches his own sides. Tension is thick in the air, and the itch of it on Jamie’s skin is almost worse than during his fucking allergic reaction.
“Did you go through a wind tunnel to get here, Coach?” Jamie teases, “You look like shit.”
Jamie’s words cut through the tension like a knife. They fall flat, but at the very least they seem to bring Roy back to life.
“You almost died.” He croaks out, and Jamie watches as the man flexes his fingers into fists. He can almost imagine the crescent shapes Roy’s fingernails are probably digging into his palms.
“Yeah, I do remember something about that.” Jamie says lightly, making a joke of it because how the fuck else is he supposed to respond to that? Of fucking course Jamie remembers the invisible hand closing in on his throat, the dwindling lack of air and the growing darkness. “Thought for sure I was going to die in the dressing room and have to haunt the lads like a sexy ghost.”
“Do you think that’s fucking funny?” Roy asks, his brows lowering in a scowl.
“Uh, no I don’t? Can you imagine having to haunt a place like the dressing room? Just smelling sweaty kits for the rest of eternity? I’d hope if I was going to haunt anywhere, it would at least be somewhere posh like Rebecca’s office.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Roy explodes, surging forward so he’s beside Jamie’s bed, “Don’t you understand, Jamie? You almost fucking died today! You almost fucking died and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it! ” Roy sat down heavily into the chair beside the bed, running a hand through his hair. Jamie watched silently as all of the anger seemed to seep out of him. When the man looked at him again there was something painfully vulnerable in his eyes. “I don’t- I don’t know what the fuck I would do without you, Jamie. I was losing my fucking mind sitting in that waiting room not knowing if you were okay. Keeley kept threatening to bribe my sister to sedate me. I couldn’t even think about my life without you.”
He’s close enough for Jamie to touch, and so he does, resting the hand without the IV on Roy’s cheek. Roy leans into the contact, nuzzling his face into Jamie’s palm. His eyes are still wide and vulnerable, and it feels like he just handed Jamie his heart straight from his chest, still beating and bloody. Jamie doesn’t want to waste it.
“Then don’t.” Jamie whispers into the space between them. He leans in and captures Roy’s mouth in a kiss.
Kissing Roy is better than anything Jamie can imagine. The kiss is soft and stupidly romantic, full of longing. Roy’s lips are soft and his beard is just the right kind of scratchy on Jamie’s face.
He wants to stay like this forever, but they soon find out that making out is pretty fucking awkward when one of the participants has a nose cannula stuck to their face. They descend into laughter when Roy goes to put his hand on Jamie’s face and ends up tangled in some of the tubes still connected.
Jamie is all for taking the stupid nose cannula off, who needs to breathe when he can be kissing Roy fucking Kent instead? But Roy just about has a fucking conniption when Jamie makes the suggestion, insisting that all medical things stay connected to Jamie’s body until the doctor tells him they can go.
Jamie tells him he’s being a boring worrywort, but the look on Roy’s face has him relenting soon enough. Jamie still pouts about it a little though because it’s his right as a human being to be upset that he can’t kiss Roy until this itchy tube is off. He doesn’t know how Hazel Grace did it all the time. Roy does concede to climbing up onto the hospital bed with him, ever so careful of the IV and other things, pulling Jamie into his side for a proper cuddle. They still haven’t discussed everything about what they are quite yet, but as Jamie drifts asleep with Roy’s fingers stroking through his hair, he knows it’s all going to be okay.
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On Jamie’s first day back at training, he’s just changed into his kit when Isaac steps up onto the bench and clears his throat.
“Listen up boys! From here on out, anything with peanuts or any of that shit stays out of this room! If you’ve eaten it before training, make sure you wash your hands after. We don’t want anyone killing Jamie.”
A chorus of agreement echoes around the room, and Jamie immediately feels guilt pool in his stomach. The lads shouldn’t have to give up any food they liked just because of Jamie’s stupid allergy. It’s not their fault his body spontaneously decided to hit the self-destruct button anytime he got near any lousy peanuts. He’s still bitter about it. Jamie’s going to miss peanut butter.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jamie protests, “Just give me a warning if you’ve got anything with nuts and I’ll steer clear.”
Everyone in the room turns to Jamie, their faces a mixture of disbelief and worry.
“Jamie, you almost died. The doctor said that any kind of contact with a nut allergen could send you into anaphylactic shock.” Sam speaks up.
Dani hugs Jamie’s arm tight. “We don’t want to hurt you Jamie.” He insists, brows furrowed. Around them, many of the lads nod their heads in agreement. Jamie doesn’t know why he’s still so surprised every time his friends prove that they actually give a shit about him.
His voice is faint when he speaks. “I just don’t want you all to have to give up a bunch of stuff just for me. I don’t want you guys to hate me for it or anything.”
“We could never hate you, Jamie!” Dani exclaims. “Your health is worth much more to us than being able to eat those things in the club.”
“Damn straight, boyo!” Colin cries out, slinging an arm around Jamie’s shoulders. The rest of the lads call out as well. Isaac calms everyone down with a few loud claps.
“Then it's settled! Operation: Don’t Almost Kill Jamie in the Locker Room Again is a go! Anyone who doesn’t follow the rules has got to hear from me!” Isaac sweeps one final glare to everyone in the locker room before jumping off of the bench, having decided the lads have all gotten the message.
“We are not calling it that.” Jamie scoffs, bending down to lace his boots.
Colin shrugs. “The other option was ‘Operation: No Nuts for Jamie’.”
“No! Nope, literally anything but that!” Jamie exclaims, “Option one is just fine with me.”
“You sure, boyo? Option two is pretty catchy…”
Colin laughs at Jamie’s outraged expression. “I would never forgive you!” Jamie declares, his eyes narrowing.
“I’m sooooo scared.” Colin teases. The effect is promptly ruined by the ungodly shriek he lets out when Jamie leaps at him. Colin flees and Jamie gives chase, twisting around each of their teammates. Both Colin and Jamie are giggling like children, and the rest of the lads aren’t faring much better at the ridiculous sight. Just as the coaches are leaving their office, Colin makes a break for the pitch, Jamie inches behind him. The two of them fly by in a whirlwind, shouting playful insults back and forth. Jamie barely catches a glimpse of Roy rolling his eyes fondly at him before he’s out the door.
Ted blinks as Colin and Jamie race by, narrowly avoiding a collision. He watches the two footballers disappear out the exit and slowly turns to the rest of the team who are watching with wide eyes.
“I don’t even want to know.” Ted declares, throwing up his hands. Though the gesture is exasperated, his face holds a poorly concealed smile.
“That’s probably for the best.” Isaac agrees.