Chapter Text
Deadline day 2014 rolls around like the afterdregs of summer wind.
It’s quiet for most of the day - scattered player swapping between lower-league teams. Whisperings about higher-profile signings come in with the midday sun — Sadio Mane to Southampton, Danny Welbeck to Arsenal. It’s routine. It’s regular. There are very few signings that make more than a splash in the papers; it’s not a deadline day for the record books. Not in transfer-record-breaking terms, anyway.
Samwell United made three deadline day signings. Two are unremarkable: a centreback signed over from the MLS and a midfielder with three years in the Bundesliga under his belt. Both are there to bolster Samwell’s youthful squad - to add a little experience to the team. Expected signings - local journalists had articles penned days in advance—nothing unusual.
Samwell United are a lower Premier League team. They were promoted in 2006 and have mumbled around the relegation zone ever since. They’ve never won any trophies or done anything of any real note—they simply exist.
They finished in 16th in the 2013/2014 season. They’re a small team in a small borough of Birmingham - technically, they should be Sandwell United, but due to an administrative error in the 1892/1893 season, they’re Samwell. Despite their consistent league positionings around the bottom end of the table, they’ve never really been in danger of relegation - their recruitment strategy is solid, and their management is consistent. They have a player or two who shine far more than they had any right to for the team Samwell is. Those facts combined keep them up, season after season.
Their third signing isn’t expected and isn’t unremarkable.
On paper, it’s the kind of signing that makes logical sense for Samwell. It follows their recruitment method exactly—a lower-league player who had just about overperformed the season before. Unfiltered raw potential. It was usually a toss-up to see if they’d be able to make it in the Premier League; most ended up bench-warming for a season before being hooked out on loan. Others went on and engrained themselves into the league. Samwell relies on those players, those younger lads with bundles of potential and a fiery willingness to prove themselves.
It makes sense for Samwell.
It is also a signing that makes history.
Eric Bittle, previously number 15 for Bristol Rovers, is a speedy, tenacious left winger. In the 2013/2014 season, he had 7 goals and 9 assists. His pass accuracy registers at around 80%, and his cross accuracy 65%. These are excellent statistics, especially for a young player and even more so for one who spent a sizeable portion of the tail-end of the season recovering from a knee injury. His injury might have made the difference to Bristol’s season—they finished 23rd, relegation.
Some teams can regroup after relegation, hang on to the squad they went down with, recruit, and go straight back up. Some end up selling off half their team to recuperate the loss of funds that relegation naturally brings and lower the heavy wage bill.
Bristol Rovers need whatever funds they can get. And they don’t want Bittle, even with his goals and assists. They offload players where they can scrape it, and he’s one of them. Samwell offers them a decent sum, and then suddenly Bittle is a Samwell United player, signed on a four-year deal.
It’s an odd signing for someone who hasn’t been keeping up with the news. Bittle is young—it’s only his first season in the league, and he’s a good prospect. His statistics are decent, but his perception of the game and his pace are his true strengths. Bristol Rovers should want to keep him. Instead, he’s offloaded the moment they get a bid in.
The thing is — three weeks before the end of the 2013/2014 season, whilst Bittle is still recovering from a knee injury and not yet back to training, The Sun discovers a disused YouTube channel. It’s tiny - under 400 subscribers, and it hasn’t been touched in years. All of the videos are unlisted but one - a final goodbye video. It’s barely under a minute long, but there’s something there, something that The Sun pick up on. Bittle has given exactly three interviews whilst at Bristol Rovers. They’d all been vaguely impersonal - not in a football-robot way, but simply because he hadn’t had the time to define any real personality.
This video is different. There’s something. The journalist who discovered the channel leans forward in his chair and types out a comment. It’s innocent enough at first glance - a request to another commenter for a link to the unlisted content. They reply within a day. The link is to a playlist - every single unlisted video.
It is not the kind of thing associated with professional footballers - the contents of the channel seem to circulate solely around baking, of all things. The focus weighs between how to cook macarons correctly and coping with playing for a League Two academy and, in the earlier videos, moving from the States to the UK.
There’s something else, too.
Samwell’s final deadline-day signing is many things. He costs them somewhere in the region of £500k. He has a wicked left foot and an excellent awareness of the game - an almost unsettling ability to pick out a pass from halfway across the pitch with needle-in-a-haystack pinpoint accuracy. He’s too short to stretch for headers, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s originally from Georgia - he sometimes calls football ‘soccer’ and apologises afterwards.
He’s also the first gay player in any of England’s top four leagues—or, as of deadline day 2014, any top league in the world.
One or two videos make mild references to his queerness - offhanded, with a shying look to his door, as though he’s worried about being overheard. In his own words, it’s not something he’s not proud of - he’s just fully aware of what the community he’s in does to people who step outside the mould.
There have been gay players in the sport, before, of course - in the women’s game, mostly, which finds itself with a much more accepting and tolerant fanbase. But the very few LGBT players in the men’s game haven’t been actively playing once they’d come out. They’d retired.
Eric Bittle doesn’t retire after The Sun publishes the article. His contract is up in a year at Bristol. In the only interview, he says he has no intention of retiring. “I love this game, ” he says, “ And I’m not gonna let this ruin it for me. And if football ain’t ready for that, then - well. Maybe there’s something wrong there.”
So he doesn’t retire, but Bristol Rovers don’t want him. Not anymore. They want his goals and assists; they want the meandering way he paces down the left wing and slyly tucks the ball across the pitch like he’s watching the game play out from somewhere far away. They don’t want anything else that may come with that - they don’t want the homophobic chants, and they don’t want to deal with the fact that it may well be their fans doing the chanting. They don’t want the trouble that comes with having the first gay player play in their colours. Bittle never does again pull on a Bristol Rovers shirt - the paper comes out a few weeks after his injury, and he’s still recovering from it by the time the season winds to a close.
Samwell United offers Bristol Rovers half a million pounds. Bristol Rovers bite their hands off for the deal - they hadn’t expected anyone to attempt to sign Bittle. It is one thing to have the first openly gay player signed to you - it is another to sign him, to seek that out. Samwell sign him, and two days later, Eric Bittle is moving into a flat in Birmingham, still almost a fortnight away from playing. The international break has put off his debut - but it’s coming. He’s been told he has a spot on the bench. Maybe a starting place after a few starts in a Cup game. Either way, he’s going to play in the Premier League.
It’s kind of a big deal.
@skysports: DEADLINE DAY - Eric Bittle from BRISTOL ROVERS to SAMWELL UNITED for £500k.
@samwellunited: Bittle is a Wellie - We are pleased to announce the permanent signing of Eric Bittle, who joins Samwell United on a four-year deal from Bristol Rovers. #WellieWelcome
@PinkNews: History made - what does Premier League Samwell’s new signing mean for the LGBT community? Read below 👇
Eric locks the door of his flat once, then unlocks it, because - goodness, he almost forgot the third batch of cookies for his new teammates. And that sure would not fly - he’d stayed up half the night making them -- bleary-eyed but restlessly unable to sleep.
He doesn’t necessarily think that the cookies will make his teammates like him - Samwell may have a reputation for being quietly tolerant, but he doubts they’re all that tolerant. (Though, then again - he was signed for a reason. They chose him.)
He doesn’t need them to like him, though. He needs to be able to trust them.
He’s started fresh before. He’d come to England when he was ten. His parents had loved the Georgia sun, but his mama’s office had opened overseas in London, so they’d moved. It was a weird trade - the blue brisk skies of Georgia, the 4th of July fireworks, the pumpkin pies every year at Thanksgiving being swapped for the grey clouds and fidgety unease of England. He’d been ceaselessly jittery as a kid - his parents had signed up to a football league, just for something to do. He’d made friends, and he’d worked out his twitchiness - but he’d also discovered that he was dang good at football. So he’d pressed on from there, on and on and on, until he was scouted by Bristol Rovers at fifteen. Since then, he hasn’t really looked back. Only on odd occasions. Today is one of those days - stood in his kitchen, filling a bag with tupperware of cookies, debating if it’ll be worth it or not. He could fade out, he thinks. He could have rejected the deal, but he didn’t.
He’d discovered he was gay around the same time as he’d fallen in love with the game. It had come in fits and spurts, hand-in-hand—he’d never been one for sports before, but Arsenal Ladies had played round the corner from him, and tickets were cheap. Plus, the boy who sat in the row in front of him was cute—something he recognised more and more with each passing game, with a sense of mild dread mixed with curiosity.
He watched them play and, with a quiet ferocity in his chest, decided that he wanted that or something like it. He kept staring at the boy in the row in front.
It had been immediately apparent that he couldn’t have that. Being gay and playing football. There were too many digs. Too many comments in the locker room. So he’d ducked his head, unlisted his Youtube videos, and faked it until he’d made it. And he’d made it. For a blissful, blissful season he’d been Bristol Rovers, through and through. He’d played 20 games at nineteen - then he’d taken a hard tackle against Bury and hadn’t been able to finish the season. And then The Sun had found his channel, and - well. Here he is.
He’s lucky. He knows that. Goodness, he knows that. Samwell has given him something when before he didn’t think he had anything left for him. They’ve given him a chance to keep doing something he loves when he thought he had been snatched wholly from his hands, and he’ll hold onto that for as long as he can. He’s not naive enough to think he’ll last more than a few seasons in the Premier League - Samwell will surely soon realise that the risk they’ve taken by signing him isn’t worth it. But whilst he’s here -
He’s going to try and change things.
He didn’t want to come out. Not when he did. He had plans to come out after a season or two, once he was settled, once he was entrenched into the fabric of the league. Maybe if he helped Bristol go back up again. But The Sun had forced it out, and he hadn’t had a choice. He’s a trailblazer, whether he wants to be one or not.
He’d realised something on the day Samwell had offered him the contract. He could either duck his head and pretend that article had never come out, or he could own it, in the way he would have done on his own terms.
He has every intention to own it.
He swings the bag holding the cookies over his shoulder, and ducks out of his door. He locks up again, swallows, breathes in and then out, and heads to Faber.
Faber Stadium isn’t where he’s going, not today, but he gets out of his taxi before his real destination to look at it. It’s not one of the biggest stadiums in the Barclays Premier League, nor is it one of the newest - it was built in the ‘90s, hot on the heels of all-standing stadiums being barred. It’s an ugly, modern-ish stadium, ringed with colours of red and white. It holds approximately twenty-two thousand.
It’s never filled with that many fans - Samwell sits in a footballing hotspot, a section of the Midlands that lives and breathes the game. They’re ringed with Aston Villa, Birmingham and West Bromwich Albion. The four teams are tentative rivals - Samwell has a fierce local derby with West Brom, their closest geographical rivals. Eric knows these things from watching the game since he was a kid, but also because of an information packet sent to him by the Director of Football, Georgia Martin. He’s not stupid - he knows he needs to win over the fans first of all, the fans of his new team, and knowing the basics is the first way to go about doing that. So he knows they don’t like the Baggies, and he knows that their stadium is literally only a stone’s throw away, so close he thinks he can just about see it.
Samwell’s stadium is in Oldbury. Oldbury is right next to West Bromwich - they’re both part of the same borough, Sandwell. Eric’s still getting used to the area. It’s different from Bristol, which was different from London before it. And Georgia, before that. Nothing here will ever be like Georgia, though. He goes back every Christmas and a scattered handful of days in the summer before preseason starts to visit his Moomaw and spends every day in a whirlwind rush trying to commit the very scent of it to memory.
He looks at the stadium and tries to imagine it alive. Tries to imagine the way it might breathe when it’s full of fans, tries to imagine the chants, the smell of pie (not the fruit kind, though if he lasts longer than a season, he might talk to the catering company about changing that - he thinks any loss could be heavily improved with a slice of apple pie) and the red-and-white striped scarves held high in the air. He tries to imagine his name being read aloud by the stadium’s announcer, the way he’d heard it before his injury - the low sweeping creek of the static, the hiss he always feels in his ears. Number fifteen, Eric Bitttleeeee , he imagines an anonymous voice in his head saying, and it doesn’t feel quite right yet but he hopes one day it will.
He allows himself another moment in front of the stadium. They don’t have a game for two weeks - he’ll have time, before that, to step out onto the grass. He’ll be the 679th player to do so, if he debuts on his first game. To pull on the Samwell red, to walk through the tunnel, to face the Falcon’s End.
It makes him jittery.
It also makes him hope.
He turns away from the stadium and heads to the training ground. It’s thankfully less than a five-minute walk from the stadium itself - a meandering cut through the car park, and he’s there.
He’s been here before, when he’d had his medical and for the signing photos he’d taken, but this is different. The team will actually be here - Premier League players. Ones who make it to Panini stickerbooks. It’s kinda terrifying, actually. Eric has only recently found himself a nervous person - but, this makes him nervous.
If they don’t like him, that’s fine. He wants them to like him. He woke up to bake cookies so they’d like him, gosh dang it. But there’s a fine line between them disliking him and them outright hating him. And that line is him - well. They could do any number of things. That’s why he’s anxious. That horrible, unspoken unknown.
His teammates at Bristol hadn’t looked at him, not after the article. It was one of the main reasons he would have never been able to play with them again - he’s been told two dozen things that make football work in the way it does, but he knows what it is at the core. Football runs on trust. The trust of knowing that you could play a ball across the field and have someone be there, waiting, at the end of your cross, the trust of knowing the goalie has you covered, the trust of knowing that someone will be there to help you up after a particularly heavy tackle.
He hopes with every bone in his body that even if Samwell United don’t like him, even if they dislike him for the fact that he’s coming in here with his headlines and his subtle Madison twang that the years away from home haven’t been able to strip away, even if they dislike him for the fact that he’s gay and he’s still playing in the Prem (goodness, the Premier League, it really hasn’t sunk in yet-) and he dares to think that maybe he could carve out a place here that he can still trust them. That’s all he wants. That’s what the cookies are for - they’re a peace offering.
The automatic doors in front of him slide open. He steps inside. He was told that Georgia would be there to greet him, but he’s still pleasantly surprised at the sight of her, and more than a little starstruck. Only a few years ago she was scoring screamers for the Lionesses at the Euros and the World Cup. He doesn’t know why she’s ended up at Samwell, of all places, but goodness, he’s glad she’s here. She’s one of the main reasons he took his chance at Samwell - she came out right at the end of her career, but she played in front of crowds, out, open, and proud. It’s not the same. He knows that. It’s not the same crowds, it’s not the same audience. But she knows in a way that he doesn’t, what it feels like. To wear your heart on your sleeve the same way you wear the badge on your chest.
He smiles at her. He’s already met her, so this part is easy enough.
“Hey, kiddo,” she says, and offers him a hand. He shakes it - his mama raised him with manners, thank you. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Oh, likewise,” he says, and something in him eases up, just a bit. For all of his vague trepidation about his debut - whenever that might be - he’s still overjoyed to be here. This is Samwell . Premier League. He’s going to carve out his place here, however he has to. “And - gosh, can I just say, ‘cause I didn’t get a second the other day - I just - I’m a bit of a fan! That Cruyff turn during the 2009 Euros - oh my Gosh, I swear, I must have watched it twenty times.”
Here’s the thing about Eric Bittle - he loves football. He loves it far more than the American version of the sport his father had tried to get him to play, once. He loves the pace of it, the way the noise of the crowd drums into his veins, the way that when he’s got the ball at his feet and he’s really into the flow of it he feels like he’s dancing. He loves football, but more than anything, he loves women’s football. Before he found himself playing it properly, professionally - back when he was still verging into the academy, he wouldn’t watch anything else. It’s a cleaner sport, the women’s game - there’s still a bite to it, but it’s not the unhinged, snapping kind of the men’s game. He watches both the men and the women’s game, now, because he has to - but the women's game was the one he first fell in love with. And part of that was due to Georgia Martin.
So, yes - he knows he must be coming across a little crazed right now, but considering the past few months he’s had, he thinks he’s allowed to be.
Georgia, to her credit, just grins back at him. “You know, Bittle, I think I like you more than most of the other boys already. I don’t think half of them know I played during the 2009 Euros. Let alone about the Cruyff turn.”
“Well, they’re missing out,” Eric says, and it comes out far too hotly, “Because - it was a masterpiece. And-”
“You’ve got training to get to,” Georgia tells him, “And a tour to do.”
“Right.” He nods and, before he forgets, takes out one of the plastic containers of cookies. He’d been meaning to give them entirely just to his teammates, but how often do you get a chance to give Georgia ‘George’ Martin your finest sea salt chocolate chip? “Here. Help yourself.”
She blinks at the cookies, puzzled, before taking one. She takes a bite, and a look of pleasant surprise passes over her expression. “Woah,” she says, “These are good . Where did you get them from?”
Eric grins at her, a little sheepish. “I made them. Last night. I couldn’t sleep, too many bees in my bonnet, so -“ he gestures towards the biscuits, “Cookies.”
“Huh,” she tilts her head to the side, “You’re full of surprises.”
“Oh, only good ones, I hope!”
She gives him a look he can’t decipher and then jerks her head to the side. “C’mon,” she says, “We better start with your tour. Else I’ll eat more of these.”
Eric nods, and follows diligently after her.
He’s shown Samwell United’s facilities quickly, not lingering too long in any room. It’s empty—the rest of the team is around ten minutes away, he’s told. That’s when the first team players will start to filter in.
He sees the cafeteria, the gym, and the sauna. He sees the locker rooms and the kitchens (gosh, the kitchens) and the six training pitches. He sees the room containing Samwell’s meagre silverware - a Birmingham Senior Cup and a few replica Playoff Trophies. The facilities are far bigger than anything he’s used to - Bristol Rovers had decent facilities, but nothing like this. Georgia briefly explains what each room is used for, and when he can use them. The tour passes quickly, though, he feels like he’s barely had time to get his bearings before they’re heading out to one of the training pitches.
“Any questions?” Georgia asks.
He shrugs, because he has loads, but it’s far too many to answer now. “Uh,” he says, “Can I use the kitchen to bake?”
Way to go, Bittle, he thinks.
Georgia looks at him. “As long as you check with the nutritionist and make sure whatever you make doesn’t throw off anyone’s diet plan, you can do what you want, kiddo. Especially if it means one or two of those biscuits will wind up on my desk.”
He grins at her. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” she waves him off, “Team will be getting here any minute. I’d stick with Wicks and O’Meara - they’re around your age. Wicks is just breaking into the-”
“First team,” he nods - he did his homework, thank you, “And - O’Meara, that’s Ollie, right? From FC Dallas.” He’d been signed on the same day as Eric had - though with half the fanfare. His expression twists – he doesn’t like the idea of being told who to stick to. He hopes that doesn’t mean the rest of the team-
“Oh, kiddo, I didn’t mean to worry you,” Georgia says, “Everyone will be fine. Honestly, they’ve all been briefed to high-heaven. Kick It Out did a workshop yesterday. It’s 2014, not the 1900s. Nobody will say anything. And if they do - well. They’ll answer to me. But probably also Knight because I’ve never had someone take notes in one of those workshops.”
Eric frowns at that. Byron ‘Shitty’ Knight (so named due to the number of cusses that wound up being bleeped in his post-game press coverage) wasn’t exactly the kind of player that he’d really expect to be ride-or-die for the only gay player in the Premier League, but then again, he of all people shouldn’t judge based on - erm. Moustaches.
He doesn’t get a chance to put his foot in his mouth again because, with a loud bustle of chatter and the familiar sound of a bag of footballs being emptied onto the soft grass, he hears that the rest of the squad has arrived, converging on the pitch behind him. They’re all gathered around the touchline, slowly heading down the halfway line to where he’s talking to Georgia, right in the middle of the centre circle. He’s spent the last year of his life playing with - and against - professional football players, but that was League Two. These are Premier League players.
“You’ll be fine, Eric,” Georgia says as she starts to walk away, “I mean it. I wouldn’t have wanted you here if I didn’t think you’d fit right in.”
He doesn’t even know how to begin to reply to that.
He lodges the sentiment in his chest instead and turns to face his team.
The first thing he notices, really, properly, is that they’re not staring at him. And that’s already better than that one disastrous final training session when he’d decided to show his face on crutches a week after the article was published. His teammates did nothing but stare even though they were more deeply engrossed in a relegation battle than him during an episode of Bake-Off.
They’re not staring. They’re just looking. Because he’s standing awkwardly on the centre circle, and - shoot, he’s the one staring. He should go over.
He brushes down the front of his jacket - it’s a nice jacket, Wellie-red, with a number fifteen embroidered smartly on the pocket - and heads over to them. He waves as he walks over.
Knight is the first one to approach him. Eric isn’t sure what he’s expecting him to say, but it isn’t: “Oh my fucking God, Bittle, you brilliant motherfucker.”
Eric just stares at him. “What,” he says weakly.
Knight offers him a fist bump. Eric accepts it. He doesn’t entirely know what’s happening.
“Okay, firstly, I am so sorry about The Sun fucking you over. So fucking lame. Like-” he looks around at his teammates. Eric isn’t sure who to look at first - his mind is still stuck in a semi-insane loop of oh my goodness holy Mary Mother of Jesus that’s Alexei Mashkov he scored ten goals in five games last season and Chris Chow is right there. “So lame. Fuck The Sun.”
“ Fuck the Sun,” he hears Justin Oluransi vehemently agree. Adam Birkholtz, standing next to him, solemnly nods.
“It’s fucked. You should have got to do that on your own terms, you know?” Then Knight winces. “Sorry. Didn’t know if you minded talking about it or not.”
“Well,” Eric shrugs, “It’s out in the open, I guess. I’m not gonna hide away from it. That’s what they wanted me to do.” He lifts his chin, just slightly.
“See, this is what I mean. ” Knight gestures at him wildly. “Brilliant fucker. But, yeah, they’re a bunch of bastards. The lot of ‘em. Fuckkkk The Sun. But - in a roundabout way, however bullshit that roundabout was - hey, just like Milton Keynes -”
“Nice,” says Birkholtz.
“-you’re here with us because of it. So. Welcome to Samwell.”
Eric swallows. And manages a smile. A real one. “Thank you,” he says softly, “It’s good to be here. Really.”
After that, most of the team dissipates - Knight, Birkholtz, and Oluransi stay, while the rest of the team jogs off to start running drills.
“Right, Bittle,” Knight says, continuing, “Usually, it would be the captain's job to give you the low-down on, you know, everything, but our fearless leader is running late.” He pauses. “Quite literally, running. Maniac runs laps around the pitches before every training session. Fucking Canadians. Insane.”
“He won’t be happy if he hears you said the ‘L’ word,” says Birkholtz.
“Well, are any of you gonna tell him?”
Birkholtz and Oluransi look at each other and then shake their heads. Eric just shrugs. Samwell’s captain is one of the youngest in Premier League history. He’s Samwell’s top goalscorer, two years running, and that’s the extent of Eric’s knowledge about him. Eric can’t imagine conversing with him, not yet, let alone telling him that Knight accused him of running late.
“Good,” Knight continues, “Anyhow, Bittle - some standard Wellie knowledge for you. You’ll pick up on everything else - plus there’s a cheatsheet with the rules and the fines stuck on the dressing room door. But - the basics. Nobody goes by their first names here. You’ll get a nickname soon enough.”
“...right,” says Eric, still trying to take everything in.
Knight blinks at him for a moment or two, snaps his fingers, and then carries on talking. “Bitty. There we go.”
Eric’s nose crinkles. He knows he’s short - he’s not, like, tiny, goodness, he couldn’t play the sport if he was, but he’s shorter than pretty much all of his teammates; he knows that from a quick Google. “Is that ‘cause of my last name or ‘cause of my height, because-”
“Your name, don’t worry, Bitty,” Knight says smoothly. “It’s a fine nickname. Everybody calls me Shitty - these two are Holster and Ransom - you get the idea, yeah? Actually - Jack’s the exception.”
“Jack doesn’t get one because he’s lame.” Oluransi - Ransom, Eric corrects himself mentally, “Though Tater - that’s Mashkov - calls him Zimbonni. Nobody else does, though. Once again, too lame for a nickname.”
“Even though it’s Tater’s?” Holster says, and Ransom digs him in the ribs for it. “Anyhow, later, Bitty. Looking forward to playing with you.”
He jogs to join the others, and Ransom runs after him. Eric waves as they disappear off.
Eric turns back to Shitty. “That’s-” he swallows, “Sure is a lot to remember. All those nicknames.”
“Eh, you get used to it,” Shitty says, “Anyways, where was I - oh, yeah. So, the first rule of an away day…”
He trails off, and Eric realises why after a moment. Samwell United’s captain is slowly jogging towards them. He’s coming from the direction of the other training pitches rather than from the facility itself. Shitty grins at him.
“Jack,” he says, “Get over here. You’ve got captain shit to do.”
Jack jogs within earshot. Eric waves at him like he’d done to the rest of the team - it isn’t returned.
“What?” Eric notices that he’s wearing truly terrible bright yellow trainers. They’re a crime against fashion. He wants to burn them, just a little bit. He thinks that would go down like a lead balloon, though, and he needs Jack to like him - no, he needs to be able to trust him, which he won’t do by attempting arson on his trainers, so he bites his tongue.
Shitty gestures towards him in a swooping kind of way. “Our newest Wellie, Zimmermann. God. Do you check the news?” Then he winces. Eric is fiercely reminded of precisely what the news has been saying about him, exactly what the headlines are. They sure aren’t about the wondergoal he scored by himself last season against three defenders and if he’ll be able to recreate the same statistics in the Premier League. They’re about how much of a distraction he will be to the league. How the league might cope with a player like him. Why Samwell chose him.
“I don’t have social media,” says Jack instead of a proper answer. He does, however, pause and look at Eric. “Oh. Bristol Rovers, right? George mentioned we’d signed a new winger. Good goal last season against Newport.” Then he frowns. “You need to eat more protein, though. This isn’t League Two.”
Then he walks off.
Eric stares after him.
He hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the elephant in the room - Shitty had kind of dragged it into the conversation, but it hasn’t come up since. But - for some reason, somehow, he has a weird feeling that Jack Zimmermann might just be the only person in the world of football who doesn’t know that Samwell United have just signed the first-ever gay player in the Premier League.
“Er, Shitty,” he says, “Does Jack - know?”
Shitty stares after him. “Now that I think about it,” he says, “Our illustrious captain was sick yesterday. He wasn’t at the Kick It Out workshop.”
“Oh.”
“He’s a fucking moron. I don’t have social media. It’ll be fine. He’ll work it out eventually.” Eric doesn’t exactly feel filled with hope at that, but - Shitty’s been decent so far. And Eric has a hard time trusting people, but he can just about feel himself starting to trust Shitty. He tells himself that the feeling in his chest is enough. “Right. C’mon, now, Bitty. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Shitty nods at him, once - he thinks it’s supposed to be reassuring, and he’s surprised to find it just about is. Then he turns on his heels, sprinting to the drills.
Bitty , he thinks. He was always Bittle at Bristol Rovers, or just Eric. He kinda likes the separation of the name - he could be Bitty, here. He’s in the Premier League, now, he’s got a place to carve out, a chip on his shoulder, and something to prove. He had something taken from him when that article came out, something that was his, but he has Samwell, now. He balls his hands into tight fists and tells himself quietly that he’ll make it to the history books, alright, and it won’t be because of some shitty Sun journalist, it’ll be because he’s written himself there.
Bitty stretches and runs to join his team.