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It happened very fast.
That was the first thing Ted said to the police — that it happened very fast.
Usually when people said that, they didn't really mean it. Speed was one of those things that tended to lend itself to exaggeration, right up until it didn’t. Time could race by really fast or it could stretch out reaaally sloooooow. A bit like if God was a toddler who'd gotten ahold of the VCR remote.
No matter how many times he tried to rewind the tape, the part where James Tartt lunged for his son stayed in slow motion.
For a split moment, the world hung still on a crunch—
—then sprung into fast forward as soon as Jamie tilted backwards.
Angled a thousand feet away and staring through the tiny screen God had made of his eyes, Ted witnessed the fall but couldn't make heads or sense of it. He'd swear Jamie hit every step in the world on the way down, but there was only one step — a wooden ledge, and the sound of Jamie’s skull cracking against it with all the dignity of an eggshell.
The boys scattered; there was no other word for it. Jamie hit the bench and the ripple cut through, throwing players out of the blast radius. Like a school of fish trying to clear out of the way.
Then the shark moved in.
When Ted's dad died, it took a whole team of people to move him out of the house.
First came the 911 operator, who instructed Ted to put his fingers over the blood on his father's neck and see if he could find a pulse. Then the three EMTs, and if somehow the neighborhood hadn't heard the commotion yet, the lights and sirens drew in a swarm. Polite puzzlement turned mouths covered in concern.
His mom and the sheriff pulled up right around the same time. His mom's car jumped the curb, crushing the petunias in the front of the driveway. With ringing ears, Ted couldn't distinguish between the sheriff's siren and the screeching wail his mom let out when she caught sight of her son. She flung herself out of the car, and Ted felt like a child with his arms held high waiting for her to swoop him from the ground.
But Ted was taller, and bigger, and by the time she pulled away, his arms ached from holding her upright.
The sheriff, who up to that point had given them space, gently extricated his mom with a quiet, "Ma'am." Taking her gently by the elbow, he led her inside so they could talk, 'without disturbing your son any further.'
Ted, it was implied with a stern nod, should stay on the porch and wait his turn.
A few minutes later came some crime scene investigators — arriving at Ted's house a good decade before the TV show would air — because someone had to verify the obvious. One of them gave Ted an odd look at the empty can of Coors Light he'd forgotten to put down. They held one of those plastic evidence bags out to him, and he dropped the can inside as simple as throwing out the trash.
Both him and the investigator were equally surprised to notice the blood staining Ted's sleeve. Ted mumbled an explanation; the man took a photo and collected Ted's shirt in another bag.
Ted never did get that shirt back.
By the point the coroner showed up, gravel-faced and dragging his feet the way Mrs. Thomas did when she walked into class the last day before spring break, Ted stood alone in the front of the house. Some misfiring brain cells insisted he greet their guest, as if the dour man in the county vehicle someone who'd shown up late to the barbecue. There was no rush to his steps, no sense of urgency or shock or grief — all the colors shading the corners of Ted's swollen eyes, this man saw none of it. He might as well be colorblind.
Business as usual.
That was the overwhelming feeling Ted remembered from that day, beyond the shock and the horror and the endless grief that would flow later later later and later. He remembered looking around the police station, where they took his statement, and then the cramped motel room his mom and him would end up staying at for the next ten days while their house was scrubbed from top to bottom by the sort of professionals who were licensed to clean up that sort of thing.
For everyone else, it was a normal day.
His dad was Ted's world. To them, his dad was a checklist that needed crossed off before they could clock out at the end of the day.
But Ted's dad wasn't a professional soccer player playing in a country where that sort of thing mattered.
Just like that day in September, it didn't take long for all of the major players to descend on the scene of the crime.
Ted spotted the back of Beard's hat as the door to the locker room swung shut. Within moments, security personal flooded through the doors. The medical personal with their bags. Then Rebecca and Higgins. Officers in uniform.
A part of Ted's heart beat violently, wondering what would happen if the next person to walk in was a coroner. Wondering if it did happen, if the world would slow to a dead stop.
If it took more than ten people to clear away the remains of David Lasso, then who knew what kind of swarm would be required to see to the likes of Jamie Tartt. Even Wembley wouldn't be prepared for that sort of busy.
As far as decisions went, following Jamie to the hospital was a no-brainer.
He didn't want to watch his boy become another checklist.
Roy had been the first to act.
When it happened, from a distance it looked like a feeding frenzy. Jamie disappeared from sight. The ice having broken, the players leapt into action — a mass of bodies plunged into the waters far too late to prevent anything, but jump they did. Ted lost sight of the fish for the sea, but not Roy. No, sir, Roy Kent was built to cut through the noise. He marched right into the storm of the fight like a Roman gladiator.
And when the crowd split under his force, the only glimpse that Ted got of—
—the sound of flesh on flesh, the wet smack and crunch filling the air over and over—
—was the sight of Roy Kent, splitting through the middle to grab the—
—offender—
—assailant—
—intruder—
—father—
—by the hood of his jacket. Roy pulled the man off and two-handed tossed him out of the pile like he didn't weigh more than a bag of beans. Roy barely spared a glance backwards.
Then it was all eyes on Jamie. Careful hands checking for signs of concussion, cupping under his skull to check the bleeding. Roy Kent, shouting for someone to get the medical team. Roy Kent, trying to shush the swollen, beaten thing with bruises already bursting under skin and blood smeared over teeth and—
Roy Kent crossed the room.
All Ted could do was stand there and watch.
In Ted's opinion, they'd never made a hospital worth stepping into. Hope and despair crowded into a maw, that's what hospitals were made of. Even the comfort came flavored with the scent of floor cleaner and dead orchids. You could call it an ER or an A&E or any other combination of letters, but a building by any other name would still give Ted the sense that he wasn't any better than a brightly colored bird in a cage being carried down a dark tunnel while people in white coats assured him that everything was perfectly all right.
But it did its job. The beeping and the machines and the people with the checklists, they were all just doing their jobs, and necessary ones at that.
To any of them, it might appear that Ted was also doing his job. It would be a charitable thought, to see Ted standing in the doorway and think he was checking in on one of his players — when the reality was that he was caught in place, no more able to close the distance between himself and Jamie now than he had been at any other point during his tenure at Richmond.
Sitting beside the kid's hospital bed with his head bowed low, Roy bore resemblance to Atlas slouched in contemplation. Jacket pulled tight over the tense cut of his shoulders, only the half-moon curve of his neck peaked out, agitation-reddened skin stark against Richmond blue.
His sleeve was stained black up to his elbow. The waterproof fabric clung to his arm, visibly tacky and wet. Just the sight of it threatened to turn Ted's stomach into a tornado at the sight — which he didn't want to be doing again, no sir. Not after the sight of Roy's hand had sent him rushing for any sign of a socially acceptable receptacle, bet that a toilet, a bucket, or even the humble bush.
A few hours and a carelessly strangled towel later, the lingering spots of dried blood no longer seemed as bad — a reddish brown tinge that looked about as damning as soil on a farmer. It crackled across the back of his knuckles like lightning splitting the sky; left rings dug deep under the nail of his thumb.
His hand lay half curled on the bed next to Jamie's arm, almost intentionally not closing the distance. A few inches closer, and he'd be offering comfort.
Although when it came to Roy Kent and Jamie Tartt, comfort wasn't a currency that Ted could imagine the two of them trading.
“If you’re coming to tell me it’s my turn to give a statement, you can tell them to fuck off. I’ll do it tomorrow. They can dig it out of everyone else first.”
The two of them sure shared a sense of artistry when it came to choosing their words though.
Ted tamped down the urge to chuckle. Just like the first time he’d heard his elementary school teacher Mrs. Norris swear, there would probably be something cathartic in it, but the situation just felt wrong. No sir, if he laughed right now, the sound would emerge ugly, circling the room like a murder of crows flying low around the scene of an accident. Except this wasn't no accident.
“Oh, I don't think you'll need to worry about that for a while," Ted said. He rocked back on his heels, his hands balled up tight in his khakis. "From the sound of it, Colin's still not wrapped up his statement yet.”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, Roy gifted Ted with his attention and a raised eyebrow.
“What, still?”
“Mhmm,” Ted hummed. “Been at it for about an hour. Most of the team’s stills waiting their turn. But that’s not what I’m here about. You mind giving us the room, Nate?”
The man in the corner spooked. Nate had settled himself into a spot along the far wall, well away from the machines and the bed. It was good, if unexpected of him ,to make the gesture to be here — which wasn't any sort of judgement on Nate the Great's character, just that him and Jamie hadn't necessarily gone out of the way to put themselves in each other's orbit since the striker's return.
Their fiddly little maestro looked downright guilty now. Ted could relate; tragedy had a way of making good men feel like a kicked dogs.
Still, as much as Ted appreciated his show of support, this was a conversation that didn't need spectators.
"Um. Sure. Yeah, I'll- I'll just wait in the hall?" Nate's voice ended on one question, but his eyes seemed to be asking another.
"That'll be just fine. Appreciate you, Nate."
Nate flinched like Ted had fired a starter's pistol behind his ear. Then he scampered out of the room, the door softly thumping behind him.
Ted made a mental note to check in with him later. It'd been too long since they'd really sat down for a one-on-one.
And, he mused bitterly to himself, It might also do him some good to remember that there were people in this world he was capable of helping.
"What's this about?" Roy asked in an unusually hushed tone. His fists flexed, still oh-so close to making contact with the person on the bed who could probably use a little gentle. "Did the…did the doctors say something…?"
“Oh! No, no! Gosh, no, nothing like that," Ted rushed to reassure. "No, I'm just looking for a second opinion about something. Usually, I’d ask Beard, but he’s—“
Back at Wembley, most likely, with his arms crossed and that deep expression that always hurt Ted for how naturally he wore it. He’d done the dirty job of hauling that man away, and Ted would bet money that his friend was still posted up with security, keeping everything kosher until the authorities could finish up with the- the crime scene.
Ted swallowed hard. He started again from the top. “I’d ask Beard, but given the sensitive nature of the topic, it may be a while before he’s fit to give me an impartial answer.”
Roy offered him a grunt, but it was the kind buttoned with a curious frill so Ted braved the path forward.
“Right. How do I put this?" Ted took a steadying breath – and the air promptly got stuck in his chest, choked under the weight of something he needed to say but was too heavy to put into words.
The longer the silence made itself an unwelcome guest, the more exclamation points Roy's grimmace added until he was a walk, non-talking cartoon caption filled with all the symbols at the top of a keyboard.
Finally his patience gave. He growled, "Just spit it out, Ted," and without any sense of what was going to come out, Ted opened his mouth and out like a cork came the spitting question:
"Do you know someone who's been abused?"
The anger wicked out of Roy's face, replaced with a cold, cold fury. He stood up from the chair, his body a fortress between Ted and the figure on the bed, as if that alone could stop the words from hitting Jamie and making them true.
"What." Not a question. A threat.
"I'm not an expert. I mean, Beard's got some stories but–," Ted ran a hand over his mouth; he hadn't meant to say that either, "–but you know, there's the stuff your friends tell you at six in the morning when neither of you has gone to sleep after splitting a case of PBR during finals week. Then there's– then there's seeing it first hand. And given how quickly you took charge back there. Well. It might’ve given me the impression that this wasn’t your first rodeo?”
The look Roy gave him could melt glass, turn it into one of those twisted and brutally delicate things that’d just as soon as crack if you dared to hold it. But he didn't appear to be entirely in the room anymore. He was somewhere else, looking at someone else, while his fists wrung invisible ropes to a strangled death.
“What–,“ Roy enunciated the word like he was drawing a knife, “–the fuck are you on about? What makes you think I want to talk about any of this?”
Ted swallowed around the bullet that had been lodged in his throat for months.
“This ain’t the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Jamie's dad.”
Roy froze. His eyes lost that glazed, half-listening luster. Fully in the room and narrowed in on Ted, the room dipped into a new arctic low.
"You met him?" he hissed, the sort of noise a steam engine might make moments before catastrophic failure. "What the fuck does that mean?"
For the next few minutes, it was like God was playing with the remote again. The DVD skipped–
"Last year, after the last match–"
And skipped.
"–wanted to congratulate him, you know. Might've been a bad day for Richmond, but it seemed like a good day for the growth of one Jamie Tartt–"
And skipped.
"–wouldn't know it, the way his head hung low, wearing a hang-dog expression if I ever saw one–"
Skipped.
"–next thing I know, a shoe comes flying out of nowhere–"
Skipped.
"–he didn't hit him–"
Skip.
"–no. No, sir. Not like a slap. I would've stepped in. It was more of a– shove? He shoved his face, and, um, some of the things he said–"
Skip, and then a screeching noise, the scene thrown in reverse as everything careened backwards to that moment.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Crunch.
Again.
Thud.
Again.
A can rustling against empty plastic.
Again.
Crunch.
Again.
Bang.
Again.
Skip.
Again.
Freeze.
All the color bled out from Roy's face.
His hands loosened. Some internal struggle dropped from his shoulders, and somewhere else a rope slipped free. From far-off came the thud of Ted's heart echoing like the distance splat of Wily E. Coyote hitting the bottom of the canyon.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Between one moment and the next, Ted watched as all the patiently hardened respect he'd fought to earn with Roy shattered into pieces.
"You watched his dad hit him," Roy spoke in quiet mutiny, "And then you fucking left."
Ted shook his head in helpless denial of the truth. "No. That's not–"
"He hit him. You watched his dad hit him. And then you fucking left."
Whatever Ted's face answered must have been enough, because Roy inhaled sharply through his nose like a bull fixing to strike. Ted might've walked in holding a white flag, but just like his shirt that day in September, it was stained red red red.
"Why the fuck did you come here, Ted?"
"I wanted – I needed your opinion. On whether I had gotten a bad read of the situation–"
Roy snapped.
"Who gives a shit what your read was," he snarled. "Jamie's skull is fractured. Even if the concussion wasn't enough, he's got a hairline break in his wrist. His ribs are bruised. I don't fucking care what you thought you saw – because you sure as shit didn't do anything to stop it from happening again. The second his dad stepped through that door, you had your fucking chance– fuck. You could have said something. You were the only one who fucking knew, and you didn't– Fuck!"
"I didn't think it was this bad."
He was full of wrong answers.
Roy grabbed him by his shirt, his fist a balled threat digging into the space below Ted’s collar. Pulling him close, his eyes wet and blazing–
Both of them noticed at the same moment the blood that stained Roy’s sleeve.
Time swung its pendulum between them; fast-forward or reverse it didn't matter.
Roy pulled away like he'd been burned. In short jerks, he ripped off the Richmond jacket Ted had worked so hard to get him into — balled it up and threw it to the floor.
The disgust on Roy's face as he stormed out of the room said all he needed to say. In case Ted still wasn't sure, the door slamming shut behind him exclaimed it loud enough.
Just at that moment, in the hollow airlessness of the room Roy left behind, a confused, small voice called out from the bed, "Dad?"
Ted's stomach swooped low. His hands went clammy, shaking like a weathervane in Kansas in the middle of the summer when the sky went green, and Ted balled them away deep the way you were supposed to when a storm was coming.
He turned to face the music.
Superficially, the Jamie propped up on the bed didn't look too bad, all things considered. The doctors had dressed him up in bandaids and gauze, and with the hospital gown hanging down to his elbows, he looked more like that sleepy man with the nightcap and candlestick than he did a hospital patient — a Barbie doll version of a hurt person, the kind that came with rubber hammers and display monitors that were stickers you could peel away in an afternoon.
Bruises and stitches that looked drawn on with a marker.
The monitors played their hymns. Jamie blinked at him, small and pale and tired—
—it hit Ted all of the sudden, this deep worry that Jamie had just played an entire match; he'd need the calories, and surely the doctors could be trusted to do their job, but all Ted could see was that tiny, drippy bag—
—and his eyes weren't focusing. That was clear as day. The way Jamie's head bobbled on his neck, his eyes drifting circles around the room, rolled into something sick sitting at the bottom of Ted's stomach like he'd swallowed lead.
He knew hospitals had a way of making ants out of monuments, but the man in the bed—
—no, that's a little kid, Ted realized, his heart dropping low where even shovels would reach. That's a little kid looking for someone who isn't coming; it's all storms from here.
Ted's eye's burned. In his pockets, he dug his fingers into the meat of his thighs, trying to ground himself in a world that felt like cotton.
"Heya, Jamie," he kept his voice gentle. "It's Ted. How you feeling, son?"
The word slipped out unbidden, which didn't stop Jamie from latching onto it like a hook.
"Dad?" he repeated, trying and failing to sit up. His head lulled on his pillow, twisting back and forth as if more than one person stood before him.
"No!" Ted exclaimed hotly. "No, your–"
—assailant—
"– that man isn't here. You're safe, Jamie."
Jamie blinked slowly, his dark eyes full of muddied confusion as he tried to puzzle out Ted's meaning. "Did we win?"
Ted wasn't the bearer of good news; he was the canary in the coal mine. Both of them, trapped in the dark and searching for the light. Both of them– both of them stuck in this tiny room, crowded with machines and no windows, and only one of them was hooked up to oxygen, a small cannula affixed to Jamie's nose to help him breathe while his ribs healed up. His cracked ribs. Probably hurt. Hard to draw in air, the way Ted couldn't– the way Ted's lungs wouldn't– the way there was only enough air to keep one bird afloat, and it wasn't him, it wasn't Ted; Ted was spiralling, the room spinning and an empty beer rattling in his stomach, a sleeve darkened and tacky and the stain it left behind—
Jamie blinked at him slowly, like even that small action caused him pain. The corner part of his eye, which should be white, was mottled with a starburst of red.
Ted couldn't be here anymore.
God blinked, and Ted was at the door, a cold metal push plate under his hand when Jamie cried out weakly–
"No, wait. Don't leave."
God hit the button again, and Ted was at his side. His hand rested on his shoulder and feeling the way it shook like a hummingbird in a cage.
"I won't. I'm not going anywhere, not this time. No-siree, someone's going to be with you every step of the way, bud. That's a Lasso promise."
Jamie sighed. The shoulder under his hand went limp, and his head fell back against the pillow, his eyes slipping shut.
"Thanks, da," he slurred. "Sorry I lost. I'll d' better next time. Tryin' to be better. Wanna make you proud o' me."
There was no shame in a man crying; that shame came from other things.
Ted cleared his throat, trying to push through the dam bursting in his throat to say, "No, no, Jamie. You didn't do anything wrong. You did nothing wrong."
Jamie's eyes fluttered open, the bullseyes of his pupils different sizes. One seeing Ted; the other, a shadow cast in Ted's likeness.
The well he spoke from was so deep even Ted wasn't sure he could reach him down there.
"I did good?" he asked.
“You did so good. Don’t worry, you– you did so good, son.”
Jamie shut his eyes.
"Get some rest now," Ted murmured, watching the kid slid off into uneasy dreams.
For the first time that day, no one hit fast-forward. Standing alone in front of a crime scene, Ted Lasso felt every second stretch, before present and after, until the sound of the machines, of Jamie's breathing, of the stilled lump of balled up bloody fabric on the floor, until all of the chords played the same sound of loss.
Couldn't spell 'a loss' without a 'Lasso.'
Somehow, despite his best intentions, it was a normal day for Ted after all.