Chapter Text
There’s a word for blood-drinking folks who share his branch on the tree of life, the kind that’re in all the movies and on TV, your Christopher Lees and your Robert Ps. Ted’s a Vincent Price man himself when it comes to the horror greats, may he rest in peace. Gotta respect a mustache like that—game recognize game. But, devilishly handsome actors aside, the word’s on the tip of his tongue. Something with an S, an old-timey morpheme meaning blood. Call him an excommunicated Catholic tuber, because he just can’t find his way back to that Latin root.
“Sanguivorous,” Beard says, handing Ted his coffee.
“That’s it.” Ted snaps the fingers of his free hand. “I wanted to say consanguineous, but I knew that wasn’t right.”
“No, that’s you. Of or related to, having the same lineage.”
He and Ted tap their coffee cups together, then on the bench between them, then Beard takes a sip.
“More like contra-sanguineous,” Ted chuckles. “Can’t say I love spending time with my cousins on the Nosferatu side, you know, few of ‘em as I’ve met. Hey, you suppose they’re allergic to fresh cut grass, on top of garlic and sunshine and whatnot? Or is it just the conviviality of a good, healthy sporting event that makes ‘em steer clear? Convivial, now there’s another word. That’d be me, convivial as they come, and the sanguivorous Sallies are what you might call anti-vivial. What with the killing.”
Ted holds the coffee cup under his nose and takes a deep sniff. The sweet, earthy smell of a well-syruped mocha warms his chest. Like most London mornings, it’s a cloudy one. It hasn’t been especially cold, not for the time of year, but a persistent chill settled into Ted a few days ago and hasn’t quite left yet.
A ding from Beard’s phone has him tugging it from his pocket. He looks at the screen, sighs, and a swell of despair follows the smell of coffee down Ted’s throat. He doesn’t mean to, but Ted smacks his lips.
“Jane?” Ted guesses, discontent to let the obvious breakfast Beard’s just given him go unremarked upon.
Beard’s big, soulful eyes stare into his very essence for a long couple of seconds. Ted gives a tight, sympathetic smile. Beard looks down at his phone and pointedly scrolls back through a text conversation from the previous night, rereading whatever it was he and Jane had to say to each other in the wee hours and trickling toxic infatuation like slow-drip coffee.
“Now, hold on, there’s no need to—I’m just peachy, alright?” Ted puts a hand over the top of Beard’s phone to lower it out of his line of sight.
“Team’s been doing well the last couple weeks,” Beard observes neutrally, but he’s looking at Ted again. With a capital L, even, in a bold, sans-serif font. “Real well.”
Ted looks away, searching the park for some wholesome morning activity to commentate on.
They have been doing well, is the thing. Ted wouldn’t call it a problem, will never call it a problem. It’s a joy and an honor, all that jazz, and a well-deserved cause for celebration to boot after all the hard work of the players and staff and everybody. The guys deserve it. Heck, he and Beard deserve it.
But where the problem might lie, if there were a problem, which there isn’t, no sir, would be, hypothetically, with Ted’s particular dietary needs. See, it’s easy to keep on truckin’ with most of your own dang neighborhood calling you a wanker with real disdain day in and day out. It’s harder—not hard, some folks got it real tough and Ted knows he’s a lucky duck in practically every way you can name—but just a tiny bit tougher when your self-constructed bubble of positivity is so strong and you’re so geographically immobile within it that the folks whose teams you’re beating are screaming at their TV sets miles away and even the smell of it can barely reach you.
Ted sniffs his coffee again. Beard unlocks his phone.
“Nuh-uh,” Ted says, shaking his head. “Not on my account. I’m all good, coach, I swear to Le Guin. You gave me my morning pick-me-up, and I appreciate you, but we gotta head out, alright?”
Beard Looks. After a beat, reluctantly, he nods.
“Hey,” Ted says as they start the walk to Nelson Road, “what would you call Sandra Bullock bein’ real sweet to vampires Michael Caine and Candice Bergen while they plan a heist together?”
“Miss Congeniality convivially conspiring with consanguineous, sanguivorous co-stars.”
“Got it in one!”
Biscuits with the Boss used to be a mutual snacktime. Rebecca is happy to have Ted barging into her office every morning like clockwork now, has been for a while, and Ted can’t deny the absence of that sweet flash of annoyance warms his heart. Still, he must be doing a worse job than he thinks hiding the ol’ green-eyed monster as he watches her hum happily as she tucks in.
“Alright, Ted?” Her pale brows cinch together in concern. He’s not one of those sons of guns who can feed on pity, so he gets nothing out of it but a familiar twist of guilt in his tummy.
“Hm?” Quick as lightning, he pastes on a benign smile.
“Do you want one?” She holds out the little pink box. “You look famished.” She takes another bite of her biscuit. Her lipstick, as always, remains pristine. It’s one of the many things he admires about her.
“Naw, those are all yours. I’m, uh, doing some medical fasting.” He pats his belly. “Colonoscopy comin’ up, I’ll spare you the details.” He rolls his eyes and adds a comically exaggerated grimace. “It’s my lot in life as a man of a certain age. Pretty much a rite of passage. Preventative medicine, what a miracle. I know y’all have complaints about the NHS around here, but I tell you—”
She makes appropriately sympathetic noises through his short ascension onto a soapbox about the American healthcare system, then looks at her phone and hisses, “Shit, I’m sorry, Ted, I’m going to be late. Rain check?”
“I’m already itchin’ for an umbrella,” he replies. “Alright—ope!” Ted cuts himself off and mouths a goodbye as Rebecca’s laptop begins emitting the distinct timbre of a shareholders’ meeting. She waves subtly as he ducks out the door.
Against the outside of the closed door, Ted leans back and takes a deep, steadying breath. He’s not anxious, he’s not panicking—he’s just hungry. It’s been a while since he’s gone like this. He’d almost forgotten what it was like, the simultaneous relief and agony. He likes himself best when he’s nobody’s parasite. He likes himself worst when his darker impulses start snapping their jaws like a starved dog. Tough needle to thread. A universally-welcome Ted is a hangry Ted, and from there it’s no long walk to being that guy.
Not that that guy doesn’t have his uses, though the good Doc Sharon would have a thing or two to say about that.
Aw, heck. She's well and truly stopped letting him drive her up the walls too. He could call her, overstep a boundary or two now that she’s no longer employed to listen to his problems, drive their friendship into the ground by becoming a former patient who doesn’t know the difference between a therapist, a pal, and a free source of carrying his baggage, and get a meal out of it.
The temptation turns his stomach. Ted clings desperately to the nausea. He shakes himself, slaps his own cheeks a couple times, and shuffles off to do his dang job.
Ted stares at the game schedule. Three weeks. That’s all it is, three weeks ‘til they play West Ham. He’ll make it through next week by rationing what he can get this Saturday at their Spurs match, when the visitors en masse do their best to manifest all kinds of hexes on the whole of Richmond’s team, staff, and supporters—there’s even bad blood from plenty of Richmond fans, considering the last time they played against that particular club, though a year on and with the season they’ve had it’s mostly pity if it’s anything.
But West Ham… Whew, boy. That’ll be a Thanksgiving feast, and Ted’ll be miserable through every second of it. Talk about bad blood. Awkward and painful, pieces of unspoken things lying strewn around the place that’ll cut you if you try to touch them. Just like a real Thanksgiving.
“Oi.” Roy’s growl knocks Ted out of his spiral. “Hydrate.” He points at Will, hovering nearby, then at Ted. Will throws a water bottle from the doorway with what’s honestly an impressive underhand toss.
“Oh. Thank you, Roy. Will.” Ted catches the bottle, presses the mouthpiece to his closed lips, and tips the whole thing so they can hear the swish.
“You’ll be thanking me again when you shit your brains out tomorrow.” Roy nods with a feral baring of teeth that is, from him, a friendly smile.
“Uh.” Ted opens and closes his mouth twice.
“Are you not getting a colonoscopy?” Roy asks. Will’s eyebrows briefly disappear under his hair before he hurries away to start laying out towels.
“Right! Yes. Word travels fast,” he laughs weakly. “Coach!” Ted drums his hands against the edge of his desk when Beard walks in.
Beard touches two fingers to his temple in greeting.
“Alright, fellas, let’s…” Ted stares for a beat too long at the empty shelf next to where Roy’s standing, then pulls himself together, or as together as he’s going to be for the next little while. “Let’s talk strategy.”
“Good luck, gaffer,” Jamie says with a pat to Ted’s bicep as he hustles off the pitch after training, half a smirk on his face.
“Yes, we’ll see you on Friday, coach,” Sam adds.
“My beautiful coach,” Dani sighs, placing his hands on Ted’s shoulders. He squeezes comfortingly, and Ted gives him a confused smile. “I’m so happy you are taking care of your health, because if you became so very sick from an ailment of the butt, I would be devastated.”
“Uh huh. Well, I sure do appreciate that, Dani.” He slaps Dani on the back as the young man unattaches himself to jog off. “Okay.”
The team trickles into the clubhouse. Ted shoves his hands in his pockets as Beard sidles closer.
“Any idea why they think I’ll be out for two days?” he mutters.
“That’s what happens when you get a colonoscopy, coach,” Beard replies. His sunglasses and visor are firmly in place, but his beard bristles pointedly.
“Who told them I was gettin’ a dang colonoscopy?” Ted yelps.
“I did,” Roy growls from the middle of the pitch. He strides over, glowering. “If a third of their coaches will be missing in action until the fucking day before a match, don’t you think the team ought to fucking know?”
“You’re right, Roy,” Ted says, “and you know what, thank you for doing that. Should have mentioned it earlier and told everyone myself. That’s on me.”
It’s not Ted’s woo-woo psychic, malevolent empathy crap that lets him pick up on Beard’s smug amusement. It’s purely the years of knowing him. He can feel it coming off the man in waves, and frankly it’s not appreciated. He can’t say a word about it until Roy grunts and walks off, but the second he does, Ted turns and takes a breath.
“Wichita, December of ‘19,” Beard says before Ted can get a word out. Ted’s jaw snaps shut.
He doesn’t have to say anything else. There’s nothing else to say. Two weeks before Christmas that year, Ted passed out in the parking lot of the university stadium. Facedown on the pavement in twenty-degree weather. The boys on the team were awash in the light of trust, respect, belief, and a hot winning streak. Ted had been practically gagging himself rejecting his body’s impulse to feed on Michelle’s frustration and sadness for longer than he’d admit. He was nearly as happy with himself as he’d ever been.
Like one of those big, hearty dogs with the barrel of booze around their necks who dig people out of avalanches, it was only the rejuvenating shot of how purely and righteously pissed at him Beard was when he found his unconscious body that put color back in Ted’s cheeks.
“You know what, fine. Yeah, alright, I’ll go get a ‘colonoscopy,’” he jabs violently at the air quotes, “and leave y’all alone in the lurch. Hell, why don’t I skip the match too?” Ted snaps. Then he hears himself—a shade too close to that guy for comfort. He clears his throat. “Sorry, coach.”
Beard looks at him for a long moment. He turns, claps Ted on the shoulder, and says, “You’re not you when you’re hungry.”
“Alright, wise guy,” Ted calls after Beard, who disappears into the clubhouse. “Who’s my Snickers, then?”
Somewhere not too far away, though further than fifty percent of locally transplanted American football coaches could navigate on foot without getting hopelessly turned around, Trent Crimm, independent, takes a bite of a candy bar.
He frowns at his computer screen and backspaces a dozen times. He checks his email. He sighs, takes off his glasses, puts them back on, and takes them off again.
Freelancing, he’s discovered, is less free than it is lancing. Trent is good at it. That’s all there is to be said. It keeps the lights on, keeps his daughter fed, and keeps him from shaving his head and running up and down the street while starkers out of sheer boredom. It’s certainly something different. He damn well knows it’s not something deeper.
When the urge to wonder what the hell he thinks he’s doing rears its head, he thinks about Coach Lasso. Ted. This is not the only circumstance under which he thinks about Ted. It’s one of the more frequent.
Trent puts his glasses back on. He picks up his phone and thoughtfully, carefully, types:
Hello, Ted. It’s Trent Crimm.
Formerly of The Independent.
The response is, as always, faster than he expects. Trent hasn’t even finished tapping out the reason he’s finally come up with to initiate contact when a horde of words comes through.
I love that you put your whole name and everything in text messages like I don’t have your contact info saved. I feel like I’m getting an old-timey telegram. Are you about to tell me Bartholomew has died of the consumption?
Yes.
Terrible business, I’m afraid. At least he went peacefully.
Trent gets a laughing emoji for his efforts. He smiles at his phone and types as fast as he can before either Ted’s commitment to the bit or his own cowardice can interrupt.
It’s occurred to me that our paths haven’t crossed much since last season. That wasn’t intentional on my part.
I believe I still technically owe you dinner, if you’d be amenable.
You don’t owe me diddly squat.
But I appreciate you reaching out. The radio silence hasn’t been on purpose from me either, I promise. Dinner sounds great.
Wonderful. What does your schedule look like tonight?
Shoot. You haven’t heard?
I’m getting a colonoscopy this week. It’s been the talk of the town.
I bet that’d be quite a scoop for you if you were still in your previous line of work. What kind of headline would they put on that one?
Inside Ted Lasso: Gaffer’s Gastric Gaffe
You had that on tap IMMEDIATELY!
I’ve been a writer for a long time, Ted.
Three dots appear. They disappear. They appear again. Trent chuckles and returns to work. He’s an adult with deadlines and responsibilities and a reputation for mature level-headedness. He can’t hover over his messages waiting for a man to text him back.
When the notification noise goes off, the phone is back in his hand before the echo of the ding is gone from his ears.
You know what? I might take you up on dinner after all.