Chapter Text
He ran, and the city passed him by, going in the opposite direction.
Barcelona unfolded around him in a succession of familiar things made strange by the hour: cafés with their chairs turned upside down upon the tables, the warm yellow light of a hotel entrance spilling onto the pavement, taxis gliding through the intersections with their headlights cutting briefly through the darkness before disappearing again. Above him, balconies hung in the night like little private stages, some illuminated, some completely dark, and occasionally he caught the sound of voices or laughter drifting down from an open window.
He liked the city better this way. At night, nobody expected anything from him.
He had dressed as he always did when he ran: black shorts, an old non-descript training shirt, comfortable shoes, nothing chosen for appearance and certainly nothing chosen to be noticed. Pedri had never understood the pleasure some people seemed to take in dressing themselves. Clothes were things you put on because you had to leave the house. They should be comfortable, practical, and, preferably, forgettable. Ferran had always found this deeply amusing.
You dress like you're going to training even when you're not going to training.
Pedri could hear the laugh that had followed it, bright and helpless and impossible not to answer. He pushed the memory away.
His shoes struck the pavement with a steady rhythm, and he settled again into the familiar discipline of movement. His breathing was becoming heavier now, but he kept it controlled, drawing air deep into his lungs and letting it out slowly, refusing to surrender to the instinct to gasp. Sweat had begun to gather at his temples and beneath the collar of his shirt, and the muscles of his legs had developed that deep, persistent ache which told him he had been running too long.
He welcomed it. There was comfort in exhaustion. Pain was simple. It had a reason. It had a language he understood. You worked until your legs hurt. You stopped. You recovered. Tomorrow, they were stronger. There were other kinds of pain which offered no such bargain. He ran faster.
The city slipped past him in fragments: a church façade washed silver beneath a streetlamp, a couple smoking outside a bar, the reflection of traffic in a dark shop window. His heartbeat had risen until he could feel every beat beneath his ribs, and he concentrated on it with almost religious attention. There. There. There. The certainty of it comforted him. His own heart. His own breath. His own body. Things that belonged entirely to him.
He passed another darkened window and, without intending to, glanced sideways. His reflection ran beside him. For a moment he barely recognized the figure in the glass. The pale hair caught the streetlight first. Platinum. Almost white.
It made his face look different, somehow younger and sharper at once. The same brown eyes looked back at him, the same soft features, the same mouth that had never seemed particularly remarkable to him. He had never been the handsome one. That had always been Ferran.
Ferran could walk into a room wearing any random thing and somehow make it look deliberate. But he knew what suited him. He understood clothes, colors, shoes, watches, the small details that transformed getting dressed into something almost pleasurable. Pedri had never possessed that instinct.
Ferran had once told him that if he wore another tracksuit to dinner, he was going to stage an intervention. Pedri had laughed. He could not remember what Ferran had said after that. Only the laugh. There was nothing malicious about it, only warmth and affection.
His own reflection disappeared behind him. Pedri kept running.
He had told everyone the hair was because of the dare. They had won the World Cup. He had said he would dye his hair blond. So he had. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Nobody had asked for another. Perhaps because there wasn't another. At least, there wasn't one he could put into words.
He ran until his lungs burned, until his legs grew heavy and his thoughts began to dissolve into the rhythm of his feet, until the city became nothing more than light and shadow moving around him.
For a little while, he could pretend that was enough. He could pretend that all he needed was the sound of his own heartbeat. He could pretend he did not remember what it sounded like when someone else's laughter joined it.
By the time Pedri got home, it was late enough that he knew he ought to have been asleep.
He was usually disciplined about such things. There were very few pleasures he allowed himself to indulge in without calculation, and sleep, above all, had never seemed to him like something one ought to negotiate with. There was training in the morning, there were matches, there were obligations that began long before the rest of the world had properly opened its eyes, and his body was his profession; it required rest, whether he felt like giving it or not.
He knew how many hours he needed. He knew what happened when he didn't get them. He knew better. And yet he laid in bed with the room dark around him, the curtains drawn, the faint glow of Barcelona filtering through the edges of them, and continued scrolling through Instagram. There was nothing there. He knew this before he opened it. There was nothing new.
The same photographs. The same football. The same congratulations and advertisements and people he barely knew smiling into cameras in places he would probably never visit. Dani had posted something from dinner. Lamine had uploaded a training photograph. There were clips of goals he had already seen and jokes he had already laughed at and things that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have passed without giving them a second thought.
His thumb continued moving. He told himself he was tired. That was all.
Sometimes a person simply could not sleep. It happened. There were nights when the mind refused to quiet itself, when lying in the dark became less restful than doing something, anything, to occupy the hours until morning. It was better than thinking. That was the important thing. Anything was better than thinking.
He refreshed the page. Nothing. He refreshed it again. Still nothing.
Pedri stared at the screen for several seconds before realizing what, exactly, he had been looking for. He closed his eyes. Idiot. There was no reason to look. Ferran had left Barcelona. Ferran was in Paris. Ferran had a new life now. There was no reason whatsoever for Pedri to expect that life to appear on his screen merely because he kept looking at it.
And yet, every time he opened Instagram, some small and humiliating part of him checked. Nothing new about Ferran. The absence of anything new felt like news in itself.
He turned onto his back and held the phone above his face. The screen illuminated him in the darkness. His thumb stopped. He couldn’t help remembering his own post. The post. Of course he did.
He had made a post only a few weeks ago, after he had finally done what everyone had been expecting him to do and dyed his hair platinum. He had taken the pictures, chosen a few he liked, and uploaded them without thinking too much about it. At least, that was what he told himself.
Then Ferran had commented. Hahahahahahaha me encanta. Pedri had stared at those words for perhaps ten minutes. Then he had deleted the post.
He still did not understand why.
Even now, remembering it made something inside him cringe with embarrassment. What had he been thinking? Nothing, apparently. That was the worst part. There had been no reason to delete it. Ferran had said something perfectly ordinary, perfectly affectionate, perfectly Ferran. He had laughed at the photographs and told him he loved the look. There had been nothing strange about it.
Pedri could have simply left the comment there. He could have liked it. He could have replied with a laughing emoji. He could have done absolutely nothing. Any of those things would have been normal.
Instead, he had deleted the entire post as though Ferran had said something terrible. And then, several hours later, he had reposted the photographs. Which was, if anything, worse. Pedri covered his eyes with one hand. What kind of person did that?
He could still remember the peculiar little sequence of events with perfect clarity: the post, the notification, Ferran's name, the sudden and inexplicable urge to make it disappear, the silence afterward, and then the even more inexplicable decision to put the photographs back. It was almost as though he had been conducting an experiment on himself without knowing what the experiment was supposed to prove. The problem was that he was looking at himself in a mirror and he felt like couldn’t recognize himself anymore.
Perhaps it was an identity crisis. He almost laughed at the thought. An identity crisis. How dramatic. He was a successful footballer in his twenties who had dyed his hair because Spain had won the World Cup. Millions of people changed their hair every year without having a philosophical collapse.
Perhaps it was simply a crisis. He stared at the ceiling. That sounded better. A crisis. Temporary. Undefined. Something that would pass.
He lowered the phone again and opened Instagram. Nothing had changed. Of course it hadn't. Ferran had not magically posted something in the last thirty seconds merely because Pedri had checked again. There was no new photograph of Paris. No new training picture. No new stupid selfie. No evidence of what Ferran was doing or who he was with or whether he was happy NOW.
Pedri's thumb hovered over the screen. Then he refreshed the page. Nothing. He knew he should put the phone down. He knew he should sleep. He knew that tomorrow his legs would be heavy if he didn't, that his concentration would suffer, that his body would remind him of every foolish decision he made tonight. He had always prided himself on being disciplined. It was one of the few things he liked about himself. Or had liked.
He turned the phone facedown on the mattress. For almost a minute, he managed not to touch it. Then, without even opening his eyes, he reached for it again.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
At the sound of the alarm, Pedri woke abruptly. For a moment he did not know where he was. The room was still dark, the curtains admitting only the faintest suggestion of morning, and the alarm continued its insistent ringing on the bedside table until he reached for it blindly and silenced it. He lay still, breathing heavily, his heart beating with the peculiar speed that belonged to waking from something rather than simply waking.
Then he felt the dampness on his face. He touched his cheek. His fingers came away wet. Pedri stared at them. He had been crying. The realization was so unexpected that he remained perfectly still, trying to summon some explanation from the fragments of sleep still clinging to him. He searched for a dream, a face, a place, anything that might have caused it. There was nothing. Whatever he had dreamed had already disappeared. Only the residue feeling of intense sadness remained. A vast and lingering silence, so complete that for a few seconds it seemed to surround him even now, in the familiar room, beneath the familiar sheets, with the morning beginning somewhere beyond the curtains. He closed his eyes. Nothing came back. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand and sat up. There was no time to think about it. His routine waited for him, and routine had always been one of the things he trusted most.
Shower. Coffee. Clothes. Keys. Wallet. Phone.
He moved through the apartment with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done the same things so many times that they no longer required conscious thought. By the time he stepped outside, he had almost convinced himself that the tears had never happened.
The morning air was cool. His car was where he had left it. He got in, placed his phone in its usual place, fastened his seat belt, started the engine and pulled away.
The city was already waking. Traffic gathered gradually along the familiar roads, cyclists appearing at the intersections, people hurrying toward buses and trains, cafés beginning to open their doors. Pedri drove carefully, as he always did, both hands steady upon the wheel, his attention fixed upon the road ahead. He did not think about the passenger seat. He did not think about the mornings when Ferran had been there. He certainly did not think about how Ferran had never understood why Pedri drove as though he were carrying something fragile.
“Bro,” he had once said, half asleep, his voice rough, “you're allowed to go faster than this.”
Pedri had glanced at him. “You want to drive?”
“No.”
“Then shut up.”
Ferran had laughed. Even when he was tired, he laughed. That was the strange thing. Ferran could wake up grumpy, barely able to keep his eyes open, hair damp and disordered from a quick shower, complaining that it was too early and that Pedri was driving too slowly and that they were going to be late anyway, and somehow, within ten minutes, the car would no longer feel quiet.
Ferran liked to have music on. Always. There was always something playing. Sometimes Pedri liked it. Sometimes he didn't. Sometimes Ferran would sing along badly enough that Pedri would tell him to stop, which only encouraged him.
He filled the car. That was the simplest way of putting it. He filled it with music and conversation and laughter, with stories that had no proper beginning and jokes that made no sense to anybody but them, with observations about people they passed on the road and complaints about breakfast and whatever had happened the night before.
Ferran could make an ordinary drive to training feel like something worth remembering.
Now there was only the sound of the engine. Pedri drove through the morning in silence. He could have turned on the radio. He didn't. He could have played music from his phone. He didn't. The silence did not bother him, he told himself. In fact, he preferred it. Silence was peaceful. Silence allowed him to concentrate. Silence was perfectly ordinary.
The traffic light ahead turned red, and Pedri stopped. He looked straight ahead. For a brief moment, he became hyper-aware of the empty seat beside him. He did not look at it.
The light changed. He drove on. Training was ahead of him. The pitch. The dressing room. The familiar faces. The familiar work that he loved so much.
He would arrive early, as he always did. He would train properly. He would do what was expected of him. He would laugh when someone made a joke, answer when someone spoke to him, run until his body was warm and his mind was occupied. There was a certain comfort in knowing exactly what the day required. He only had to get through it. And then the next one. And the next.
Pedri tightened his hands slightly around the steering wheel and kept his eyes on the road. He did not turn on the music.