"I'm telling you — it even got to the point where we had to do special check-ins on him for the next six months," Javi said, his voice carrying easily across the hall, "just to confirm he was actually in his room."
The laughter that came back was immediate and full, rolling through the crowd in a warm, familiar wave — the laughter of people hearing a story that confirmed everything they already suspected.
After Óscar finished his speech, it had simply been the beginning.
Alejandro came up next — and once he was done, it opened like a door that nobody was going to close again. The coaching staff came forward one by one, each with their own story, their own particular memory of Mateo that they had apparently been carrying around waiting for exactly this kind of occasion. Some academy players spoke. Mrs. Rosa, who had already said her piece privately at the table, came up anyway and said it again in front of everyone, to nobody's surprise and everyone's delight. Anyone who had a story — and it became clear very quickly that this was essentially everyone in the building — did not shy away from telling it. Even Patrick, whom Mateo had only properly met for the first time today, had stepped up and delivered a short, polished speech that landed with the practiced ease of a man very comfortable in front of a room.
That had been over thirty minutes ago.
Now, standing in the middle of the hall with the microphone, was Javi.
The gateman. The man who had sat in that small booth at the entrance of La Masia for more years than most of the students had been alive, waving players in and out, knowing every face, remembering every name — and, as it was becoming increasingly clear, witnessing things at that gate that had apparently never made it any further than the gate itself.
"Those were some wild times," Javi said, exhaling with the satisfied sigh of a man revisiting a memory that had genuinely entertained him for years. The smile on his face was wide and easy. "And those were only when he was fourteen years old."
He paused for effect.
"With age — he only became worse." Another pause. "And worse." Another. "And worse—"
The crowd did not wait for him to finish.
"AND WORSE!"
The hall called it back at him in a single voice — students, staff, coaches, all of them together — and the sound of it bounced off every wall at once, loud and gleeful and entirely united on the subject.
Javi dissolved into laughter, nodding vigorously, pointing out at the crowd like they had just proven his point more effectively than he ever could have on his own.
He steadied himself after a moment, wiping the smile from his face with the kind of effort that suggested the smile had absolutely no intention of leaving.
"He is a good boy though," Javi said, and the warmth in his voice when he said it was immediate and genuine, cutting clean through the laughter. "Don't get me wrong. That boy — he would come and sit with me in the booth on the quiet afternoons, you know? Just talk. About nothing. About everything." He shook his head fondly. "He made jokes that had no business being as funny as they were. He remembered things — little things, things people say once and forget they said — and he would bring them back weeks later." A small laugh escaped him at some private memory. "He treated me like I was the most important man at this entire academy. Every single time."
He looked out at the crowd for a moment, then his eyes moved — just briefly — to Mateo at his table.
"I would say more," Javi said, the smile returning now with a slightly different edge to it — knowing, warm, conspiratorial — "but what happens at the gate—" He stopped. Looked at Mateo. "—stays at the gate."
Across the hall, Mateo looked back at him.
For a moment — just a moment — the two of them held the look. And then, in perfect unison, they both nodded. Once. The slow, deliberate nod of two people who have an understanding that requires no further elaboration and will be taking it with them to their graves.
Javi held it for exactly one second longer before he completely lost the battle with himself and burst out laughing — the full, unguarded laugh of a man who had just relived something he was extremely glad nobody else in the room was ever going to know about.
The crowd laughed with him, delighted, even without knowing why — perhaps especially without knowing why.
Javi composed himself eventually, straightening up, running a hand across his face. He looked around the hall — at all of it, the decorations and the faces and the warmth of the evening — and something in his expression settled. Became more deliberate.
He reached down to the small table that had been set up beside the speaker, and lifted a cup — full of soda, fizzing gently at the rim — and held it up in front of him.
"A toast," he said.
The word landed simply and the room responded to it immediately — the rustle of movement, the reaching for cups and glasses and whatever was nearest, people getting to their feet without being asked, the whole hall rising together in the easy way that happens when a moment is right and everyone knows it.
Javi waited until the room was standing. Then he looked down at his cup, and back up at the crowd, and spoke.
"A toast," he said again, slower this time, "to one of the most talented people these eyes have ever had the privilege of watching grow up." He held the cup a little higher. "To a boy who could have used that talent as a reason to look down on the people around him — and never once did. To someone who made this place feel alive every single day he was in it, who gave you his full self whether you were a director in a suit or a man sitting in a gate booth watching cars go by." His voice had dropped now, quieter, carrying further somehow for being less loud. "To someone who reminded me, more than once, that this work we do here — all of us, in whatever small way — it matters. Because it produces people like him."
He stopped. Let it breathe.
Then his voice came back, softer still — the words no longer addressed to the room but to one specific table at the left edge of the hall.
"To my friend."
He said it the way people say things they have thought about before saying. Not casually. Not as a flourish at the end of a speech. As a fact he was stating for the record, clearly, in front of everyone, because he wanted it heard.
His eyes were open and steady and entirely serious.
"To my friend."
He drew a breath, lifting the cup to his lips — and then something in his peripheral vision stopped him completely.
His eyes moved to the entrance of the hall.
They stayed there.
His mouth opened — and what came out was not a toast. It was not anything he had planned to say. It arrived in the voice of a man who had just seen something his brain was still in the process of confirming.
"Piqué?"
...
"Piqué?"
The word left Javi's mouth and hung there — and for a single suspended second, the entire hall processed it in silence.
Then everyone spoke at once.
"Piqué?" "Who is that?" "Who is he talking about?" "Wait — the Piqué?" "Is he serious right now?"
The reactions moved through the room in overlapping waves — confusion from the younger students who hadn't caught the name clearly, excitement from those who had, a general turning of heads toward the entrance that rippled from the front of the hall all the way to the back like something physical passing through the crowd.
At his table, Mateo was frowning.
He looked at his friends first — Gavi, Fermín, Casado, Balde — and found the same expression on every face. Genuine confusion. No one had known this was coming.
He looked back at Javi, who was still standing at the microphone, cup still raised, frozen completely in place — a man whose toast had been derailed by his own eyes, staring toward the back of the hall with the expression of someone who was not yet fully confident in what he was seeing.
Mateo turned in his seat.
He squinted.
By the door — half in, half out, slightly obscured by the cluster of people near the entrance — was a figure. Tall. Familiar in the specific way that certain faces become familiar not because you know them personally but because you have seen them so many times they belong to some permanent part of your mind.
Mateo's mouth moved before he had made a conscious decision to speak.
"Piqué?"
He said it the same way Javi had said it. The same disbelief, the same quiet, the same single word carrying more question than any sentence could have managed.
He was not alone in it for long.
The hall had already seen him. The murmur that moved through the crowd was not the orderly kind — it was the kind that builds on itself, each voice adding to the next, the volume climbing rapidly as the information spread from person to person in real time.
"Wait — wait, is that Piqué?"
"What is he doing here?"
"Duh — Mateo's a first team player now, he probably came for him—"
And the hall went, in the space of about fifteen seconds, genuinely wild.
Because this was different. Mateo — technically, officially — was a first team player. But Mateo was still Mateo. He was the boy they had watched run these corridors for years, the one who stole snacks and showed up late and sat in Javi's booth on quiet afternoons. Seeing Mateo walk through La Masia felt like seeing a friend. Seeing Piqué — Gerard Piqué, actual first team, actual Barcelona, the man whose face was on the billboards outside — walk through the door of their hall and stand in their space, under their balloons, in front of their banner, was something that operated on an entirely different frequency.
It felt, to a significant portion of the room, surreal.
The La Masia students who had done tunnel walkouts with the first team — who had stood beside these men in corridors before matches and thought they were used to it — found out very quickly that seeing someone in a tunnel was not the same as seeing them appear at your party. Even those students were murmuring, nudging each other, doing their best to look casual and not quite getting there.
The only ones holding their composure with any real success were Mateo's friends — who had met them all before, through Mateo, and had accumulated enough exposure to maintain basic functionality — and the club executives, who were professionally accustomed to being in rooms with first team players and wore that familiarity like a second suit.
Or they had been holding their composure, at least, until Piqué turned back toward the entrance and appeared to say something to someone just outside the door.
Mateo didn't need to guess. He was already pushing his chair back, already on his feet, moving through the hall toward the entrance — because he knew, before he saw, who else was coming.
Pedri came through first.
The murmuring surged.
Then Alba stepped in behind him.
Another wave — louder, less controlled.
Then Griezmann appeared in the doorway, ducking slightly as he entered, glancing around the hall with the easy expression of a man taking in a new room.
The crowd was no longer murmuring. It was buzzing — a constant, climbing, barely-contained collective sound, the energy in the hall ratcheting upward with each arrival, students craning their necks, staff members pressing forward slightly, the whole room leaning in like a single organism.
And then the fifth figure stepped through the door.
The sound that came out of La Masia's hall in that moment was not a murmur and it was not a buzz.
"AHHHH — IS THAT MESSI—"
"MESSI IS HERE—"
"HE'S HERE, HE'S ACTUALLY HERE—"
"NO WAY. NO WAY—"
"I'm wearing my JOGGERS — I cannot meet the GOAT in my JOGGERS—"
The hall detonated. There was no other word for it. Students who had been standing still were suddenly moving — toward the entrance, toward each other, toward anyone nearby who could confirm what their eyes were telling them. The younger ones had completely abandoned any pretense of composure, some of them grabbing each other's arms, some of them just standing with their mouths open, making sounds that had not quite resolved into words yet.
Even the executives — the suited men who had remained visibly, professionally unbothered through the arrivals of Piqué, Pedri, Alba, and Griezmann — were no longer unbothered. The effect was subtle but unmistakable. A hand moved to a lapel, straightening it unnecessarily. Someone smoothed their hair back with a quick, slightly too-casual palm. Another reached discreetly into his breast pocket, produced a small breath mint, and made it disappear with practiced efficiency. They were composed — more composed than the rest of the room by a significant margin — but the composure was now something they were actively maintaining rather than something that was simply happening on its own.
Messi stood just inside the doorway in his normal clothes — relaxed, unhurried, completely unbothered by the noise — and looked around the hall with the quiet, familiar expression of a man who had been causing this particular reaction in rooms for so long that it had become simply the background texture of being him.
Mateo, already halfway across the hall, registered the eruption around him — the volume tripling in the span of a breath, the wave of noise crashing from every direction at once — and stopped for just a fraction of a second. Not from awe. Not because he was starstruck. Just because the sheer wall of sound that accompanied Messi's entrance was a physical thing, and any person with functioning senses would have paused inside it.
He gathered himself. Kept walking.
It didn't take long to reach them — his teammates, his people, standing just inside the entrance of the hall in their regular clothes, looking for all the world like five men who had simply decided to show up.
"What are you guys doing here?"
Mateo reached them first, slightly breathless, the noise of the hall swelling behind him like a living thing as he looked at the five of them standing just inside the entrance. The room had not calmed down. If anything it had gotten louder — the collective energy of the hall finding no outlet, just building on itself, every eye in the place pulled helplessly toward this corner of the room.
Piqué looked at him.
"It's nice seeing you too," he said, completely dry, the sarcasm delivered with a small chuckle that said he had expected nothing less.
Griezmann stepped in from behind him, hands in his pockets, relaxed as though he dropped into La Masia parties on a regular basis.
"We came for a documentary thing," he said. "Then we heard you were throwing a party and decided to drop by."
Alba had already stopped listening. His head was up, his eyes moving methodically around the hall with the focused attention of a man on a specific mission.
"Yeah," he said absently, still scanning. "Is there cake?"
Mateo blinked. Turned. Pointed toward a table on the far side of the hall.
"I think there's some over there."
Alba's face broke into a smile of genuine relief. He was already moving before Mateo had finished the sentence, heading in the direction of the dessert table with purpose, muttering just quietly enough to be heard as he went—
"Roma doesn't let me near any sweets."
Griezmann glanced after him, considered this for approximately half a second, and followed.
Pedri, who had been standing slightly to the side taking in the hall with his usual quiet attention, stepped forward.
"Hope we aren't disturbing," he said. "I told them about the party — I didn't actually think they'd want to come."
Mateo laughed, shaking his head. "No — of course not. I'm genuinely happy you all came."
He glanced back over his shoulder at the room — at the sea of faces still fixed on this spot, students nudging each other, staff members craning to see, the whole hall operating at a frequency several levels above its normal capacity.
"Though the attention is a little—"
His eyes drifted sideways mid-sentence, and he stopped.
Messi was standing just to the side of the group, slightly apart from the rest of them, looking around the hall with the calm, unhurried expression of a man taking a quiet moment to himself. Completely still. Completely unbothered. Apparently either unaware of or entirely at peace with the fact that the room around him had essentially stopped functioning normally the moment he walked through the door.
Mateo stared at him for a moment. Then he shook his head slowly, a laugh escaping without permission.
Some things just did not change.
Beside him, Piqué was already glancing back toward the dessert table.
"Where did you say that cake was again?"
"Oh — wait, wait." Mateo turned back, catching him before he could drift. "There's actually someone I want you to meet first."
Piqué looked at him. Raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Mateo was already smiling, already turning. "He should be around the front."
He started moving and Piqué fell in beside him, and then — about three steps in — Mateo remembered.
He stopped. Turned back.
Pedri and Messi, still standing where he'd left them.
"Oh — right." He redirected quickly, looking at Pedri. "The guys are over at that table." He turned, found the table he'd been sitting at across the hall, and Balde spotted him looking at almost exactly the same moment — raising a hand in a wave, the others turning to follow.
Pedri followed his gesture and nodded. "Okay."
"Yeah." Mateo's eyes moved to Messi. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again — not quite sure, in this specific situation, what the correct thing to say was. You did not really direct Messi somewhere. It felt presumptuous in a way that was difficult to articulate.
"Ehm — you can come—"
Messi was already smiling before the sentence finished. "Don't worry." He nodded slightly, easy and unhurried. "I've seen some people I know. You go."
"Oh — okay." Mateo nodded. "Yeah."
He turned back, Piqué beside him, and started navigating through the hall.
He glanced back once — just to check.
Alba and Griezmann had made it to the snack table and were already surrounded. A semicircle of students had formed around them with the rapid, organic efficiency of iron filings near a magnet, everyone pressing slightly forward, phones appearing from pockets, the two of them accepting it all with the practiced ease of men who had long since made their peace with this being a permanent feature of their lives.
Another glance — Pedri had reached the table. Fermín was already on his feet, hand extended, the others rising around him, everyone greeting each other with the loose warmth of people who had met before and were glad to be in the same room again.
Mateo felt something in his chest settle.
One more look — and he found Messi. Alejandro had crossed the room and reached him, and the two of them were standing together now, talking quietly, both of them smiling — the easy, genuine smiles of people who go back further than tonight.
That's right. The memory surfaced gently. Manuela. Francisco. Of course Alejandro knew him.
Mateo turned back to the front of the hall, where Javi was still standing at the microphone, cup still in hand, toast still technically unfinished, watching the two of them approach from across the room.
Or rather — watching Piqué approach.
From this distance, Mateo could see the exact moment Javi fully registered what was happening. His mouth moved. No sound came out at first, just the shape of words his voice had temporarily forgotten how to support.
No way. The lips formed it clearly. Is he actually bringing him here.
He looked left. He looked right. Back at them.
Really here. They are coming. They are coming. They are—
The cup shifted in his hand. His weight moved from one foot to the other. Something close to controlled panic was moving visibly across his face, the expression of a man whose mind was presenting him with a situation and his body was not yet sure how to respond to it.
Be cool. Be cool. Be cool. Be cool—
"Hey," Mateo said, reaching him.
Javi's whole frame snapped into place like a man who had made a decision.
He dropped his voice a full register — thick, slow, the performance of a man who was extremely relaxed and had always been extremely relaxed and had definitely not just been silently catastrophizing for the past forty-five seconds.
"Hey."
Mateo looked at him.
The voice. The posture. The studied blankness on his face.
He looked at him for a moment longer, then looked away, pressing his lips together against the laugh that was already climbing.
He turned to Piqué.
"Piqué — I want to introduce you to someone." He gestured toward Javi with a smile that was doing several things at once. "This is Javi. Your biggest fan. My friend."
Javi opened his mouth.
What was supposed to come out was something smooth. Something easy. Something that confirmed he was, in fact, extremely cool and had been this whole time.
What actually came out was:
"Him — you — my — I mean—" He stopped. Tried again. "You are — him — I mean I am — biggest — he said biggest fan—"
The words arrived in no particular order, each one apparently surprising him as much as it surprised everyone else. His hand came up — he wasn't sure why — then went back down. The cup in his other hand tilted at an angle that threatened its contents.
Mateo had stopped fighting the laugh entirely. It was out now, full and helpless, his head dropping forward.
Piqué looked at Javi with the warm, unhurried smile of a man who had been on the receiving end of this particular reaction many times and had never once stopped finding it genuinely touching.
He extended his hand.
"Nice to meet you, Javi."
Javi stared at the hand for a moment. Then he reached out and shook it — carefully, with both the focus and the reverence of someone defusing something precious.
The handshake ended.
Javi looked down at his hand.
He turned it over once. Looked at the palm. Looked at the back.
Then, very quietly, in a voice that was mostly just breath—
"I'm never washing this again."
...
Thirty minutes passed.
The shockwave of the first team's arrival had settled — not disappeared, but settled, the way a storm softens into steady rain. The energy was still there, still felt in every corner of the hall, but it had found its shape now. The party had fractured pleasantly into factions, each one orbiting a different centre of gravity, the hall arranging itself around the guests the way rooms always do when certain kinds of people walk into them.
Pedri had been absorbed seamlessly into Mateo's table, the conversation there loud and easy, Fermín already talking too fast the way he did when he was comfortable. Griezmann and Alba had not moved far from the dessert table — whether by choice or because the crowd that had gathered around them made movement logistically difficult was unclear, but neither of them appeared to be complaining. Piqué had been claimed by a group of coaches who had managed to maneuver themselves into his vicinity with the quiet, practiced patience of people who understood that these opportunities required strategy.
And then there was Messi.
More than half the hall had drifted, gradually and inevitably, toward the corner where he was standing. The executives — who had maintained dignified distances from everyone else all evening — had abandoned that particular pretense entirely. They were gathered there too, suits and all, standing at the edges of the larger cluster with the barely concealed eagerness of men reminding themselves to act like this was normal. Staffers and players had risked the executives' potential displeasure without a second thought, pressing forward anyway, some of them clutching books and pens with the specific hope that had only one possible outcome in mind. A few of the younger students had worked their way to the inner edges of the group and appeared to be in a state of low-grade suspended disbelief, like they were not entirely convinced this was happening in real life.
Messi stood in the middle of it all and talked to whoever was in front of him, quiet and unhurried, as though the crowd around him was simply the natural weather of any room he happened to be in.
"Phew."
The sound slipped out on its own as Mateo pushed through the door and stepped outside, the noise of the hall cutting off behind him as it swung shut. He paused for a moment, looking back through the narrowing gap — catching one last glimpse of the movement and colour and warmth inside, hearing the layered sound of voices and laughter — before the door closed fully and the evening quiet settled around him.
He stood there for a second. Then he walked a little further, found the stairs, and sat down.
He drew in a long, slow breath — the kind that reaches all the way to the bottom of the lungs — and let it out gradually.
"I am so tired."
He said it to no one, to the open air, with the complete satisfaction of someone who had earned it entirely.
He had needed this. The hall had been wonderful — genuinely, completely wonderful — but it had also been loud and warm and full for hours now, and somewhere in the last thirty minutes his body had quietly filed a request for two minutes of nothing. He was not sad. He was not overwhelmed. He was simply a person who had been at the centre of a great deal of love and attention for a very long time this evening and needed a moment outside with the air and the quiet before he could go back and receive any more of it.
If this had been a few hours ago, stepping out would not have been possible. He could not have left without it meaning something, without someone noticing and the absence mattering. But with the first team here now — with five of them distributed through the hall like additional suns, each one pulling their own gravitational field of attention — Mateo could slip out the door and be fairly confident the hall would not notice he was gone for a few minutes.
Especially with Messi in there.
He thought about that now, elbows resting on his knees, looking out at the early evening light. He could still picture it — the way the room had reorganised itself around Messi without anyone deciding to do it, without any instruction or announcement, just the simple physics of his presence causing everything nearby to reorient. Half the hall drifting in one direction like a tide following the moon, completely natural, completely inevitable.
Mateo knew why, obviously. He was not confused about why. That was Messi. The reasons were well-documented and visible to anyone who had ever watched a football match. The scale of what he was, what he had done, what he continued to do — it was not mysterious.
And yet.
The way it happened in person, every single time, in every single room — the way people who had met him before still reacted, the way professionals who worked alongside him daily still found their eyes pulled in his direction — it never quite lost its capacity to make Mateo pause.
He was no slouch himself. He knew that. He was not being falsely modest when he acknowledged that he had started drawing his own attention lately — the stares in corridors, the phones that came out when he walked through certain spaces, the weight of expectation that had started following him around like a second shadow. He had felt it building, knew what it represented, understood what his recent performances had set in motion.
But put him in the same room as Messi and all of that shrank. Quietly, completely, without drama. He became just another person in the orbit.
His eyes drifted to the light sitting on the horizon, the sun low and golden, and something moved through his chest that was not quite an emotion yet — more like the first edge of one, the feeling before the feeling arrives.
I want that.
The thought came clearly, without embarrassment. He didn't push it away or qualify it. He just held it for a moment and let it be exactly what it was.
He wanted to walk into rooms the way Messi walked into rooms. He wanted the kind of gravity that came not from novelty or youth or promise, but from an accumulated body of work so undeniable that rooms simply reorganised themselves around the fact of it. He wanted to be that — not Messi, not a copy of him, but that level. That specific altitude.
He wanted it badly.
Then he laughed.
A short, quiet laugh that he directed mostly at himself, shaking his head slowly.
I haven't even played twenty games yet. What am I sitting here thinking about.
The thought was absurd when he held it next to the reality of where he was — sitting on some stairs outside a La Masia farewell party, legs tired, slightly stuffy from being indoors too long. He buried it gently, pushed it to the back where it could wait. It would keep. It was actually a good thing to keep — he had discovered that whenever he started feeling even slightly too comfortable with himself, thinking about Messi had a reliable and immediate corrective effect. The distance between where he was and where that was became very clear very fast, and then the only reasonable response was to get back to work.
It was not a bad thing to carry. It was an excellent thing to carry.
He was still looking at the light when he heard a sound behind him.
"There you are."
He startled — just slightly, just enough — and turned.
Messi was standing a few steps back, hands easy at his sides, looking at him with the calm expression he seemed to carry everywhere.
Mateo blinked. "Leo—"
"I was looking for you," Messi said simply, moving forward and settling beside him on the stairs without ceremony, the way someone sits down in a space they have already decided is comfortable.
"I just—" Mateo gestured vaguely back toward the hall. "I needed some air. It was getting a bit stuffy inside."
Messi nodded, like this was a perfectly complete explanation.
A short quiet settled between them — not uncomfortable, just a breath of space. Then Messi looked at him.
"How are you?"
He asked it the way he asked most things — without decoration, direct, meaning exactly what it said. And Mateo understood, in the way you understand things when someone has sat with you in a restaurant and listened to you talk honestly for an evening, that the question was not about tonight specifically. It was about all of it. The leaving, the moving on, the things Mateo had admitted out loud over that dinner that he had not quite said to anyone else — the uncertainty, the weight of stepping away from the only home he had properly known, the quiet fear underneath all the excitement.
Messi had remembered. He had come to the party because he remembered, and now he was sitting on these stairs asking the question he had actually come to ask.
Mateo was quiet for a moment.
He looked out at the light again — the same light he had been looking at when the thought about Messi crossed his mind. He thought about the hall behind him, about Oscar's speech and Alejandro wiping his eyes and Javi with his cup raised and Mrs. Rosa pressing the flask into his hands and every person inside that room who had shown up tonight and meant it.
"No," he said eventually. His voice was steady. "I'm not sad." He said it clearly, like he was confirming something to himself as much as to Messi. "If I'm sad — that would be a disgrace to all of them. To everything they gave me." He shook his head slowly. "The only way I can pay any of them back — properly, actually — is by moving forward. By making everything they put into me worth something out there. Right?"
He felt it as he said it — felt it settle in a way it hadn't quite settled before tonight. The last small threads of something he had been holding loosely, some lingering reluctance that had lived at the edges of his excitement without him fully naming it — he could feel them releasing, gently, like something that had been waiting for permission.
His eyes stayed on the outside, on the light and the open air and the quiet. He looked at it — really looked at it — and then something in his face softened. A small smile came, unhurried, sitting easily.
He was ready.
Messi looked at him for a moment. Took in the expression, the steadiness, the smile that had arrived without being performed.
Then he nodded once — quiet and certain, the nod of a man who has seen what he came to see.
"Right" he said.
...
"There they are."
Piqué's voice came from behind them, and Mateo turned to find the four of them filing out through the door — Piqué, Alba, Griezmann, and Pedri — emerging into the outside air one after the other, the door swinging shut behind them and cutting off the noise of the hall.
They reached the stairs and Alba was already looking at his phone before he had fully stopped walking.
"We need to start leaving," he said, turning the screen toward the group as evidence. "The team liaisons are looking for us."
Mateo looked at them. "You guys are leaving already?"
"You remember that documentary we mentioned?" Griezmann said.
Mateo nodded.
Pedri picked it up. "We haven't actually started yet. We asked for a few minutes break so we could come here first."
"Oh." Mateo took that in — the fact that they had carved time out of something official, redirected their afternoon, shown up in the middle of a La Masia party just to be here for a little while. He felt it land somewhere it was supposed to land. "Okay — let me walk you guys out—"
"No, no." Multiple voices, almost simultaneously.
"Don't worry about it," Piqué said, waving him off.
"Just go enjoy your party." Messi's voice was easy and final, the particular tone of someone closing a conversation gently but completely. "We'll see ourselves out."
Mateo looked at them for a moment — all five of them, standing in the early evening light outside the hall that had been decorated for him, who had come here in the middle of their day because Pedri had mentioned a party and somehow that had been enough reason.
"Okay," he said. "Thank you. For coming — genuinely."
Goodbyes moved around the group, warm and unhurried. Handshakes, a pat on the shoulder, the easy farewells of people who exist in the same world and will see each other again soon.
Piqué was turning to go when he paused. His eyes dropped briefly, the expression of someone following a thought that had just resurfaced.
"That friend of yours — Javi." He looked at Mateo. "The sneakers he was wearing. I'm almost certain I have a pair exactly like that." He frowned slightly. "I just can't find them anywhere."
Mateo went very still.
"Ha—" The laugh came out slightly strangled. He coughed once, covering his mouth with his fist, looking away for a fraction of a second. "Yeah. Wild coincidence."
Piqué held the look for a moment, then nodded slowly, apparently satisfied, and turned to go.
Pedri lingered half a step, catching Mateo's eye. "Make sure you send me your new address details."
"Sure thing," Mateo said, steadier now.
"Okay." Pedri smiled. "Bye."
"Bye," Mateo said, lifting a hand. "Bye — thank you — safe journey—"
He watched them go, waving once more as they moved toward the exit, until they rounded the corner and were gone.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he exhaled.
After the first team left, the evening began its natural unwinding.
It didn't take long. Their departure seemed to signal something — a shift in the air, the way a party knows when its highest point has passed and begins, gently, to let go. The executives were next, moving out in a cluster, Patrick at the front. They stopped to find Mateo one more time on their way — pleasantries exchanged, hands shaken again, the same warmth as before, slightly more formal now that coats were on and the evening was closing. Then they filed out through the door and were gone.
Javi left shortly after, still in what could only be described as a daze — moving at a slightly slower pace than usual, the expression on his face that of a man replaying something on a loop that he had no intention of stopping. The words drifted back as he went, barely audible, aimed at no one in particular.
"Best day ever."
He said it at least three times before he was out of earshot.
The kitchen staff departed together, Mrs. Rosa shepherding them out with the same quiet efficiency she brought to everything, pausing to squeeze Mateo's arm once more before she went. The manual workers filtered out in ones and twos. The female students made their way back to their side of the building in a cheerful, chattering group, waving across the courtyard.
The La Masia boys migrated, as they always eventually did, to the play area — the FIFA queue forming with the speed and organisation of something that had been silently planned for hours, controllers appearing from nowhere, arguments about team selection beginning before anyone had even sat down.
The hall, which had been so full and so loud for so long, grew quiet behind them.
"You boys make sure to take care of each other, yeah?"
Oscar's voice came through the open window of his car, parked at the edge of the lot, engine running. He was looking at the group of them — Mateo, Gavi, Fermín, Casado, Balde — assembled on the tarmac in the early evening light, Alejandro standing slightly to the side with the comfortable stillness of a man who had said everything he needed to say inside.
"Yes, Gaffer," they answered — all of them, together, the unison of it completely unplanned and somehow perfect.
Oscar nodded. Satisfied. He let his eyes move sideways to where Alejandro stood, and something passed between them — quiet, mutual, the acknowledgment of two people who had spent years in the same building working toward the same thing.
Oscar nodded at him.
Alejandro nodded back. Nothing else needed.
"See you later," Oscar said.
Alejandro said nothing. Just nodded again, once — which, from him, meant everything.
"Bye," Oscar said. And then the car moved, pulling slowly out of the lot and toward the gate, and they stood and watched it go — all of them tracking it in silence as it reached the gate, passed through, and disappeared from view.
The quiet it left behind settled over the group.
"He's gone," Casado murmured.
Alejandro made a low sound of acknowledgment in his throat — not quite a word, just the confirmation of someone watching the last chapter of something close properly.
They stood there until there was nothing left to watch. Then Alejandro straightened.
"Okay, boys — let's—"
"My ride is here."
Mateo said it quietly, almost to himself, his eyes on something past the group. They all turned.
A van had come through the gate — moving slowly, headlights catching the early evening — and Mateo was looking at it with the expression of someone whose brain is doing quiet arithmetic they were not quite ready to do.
He glanced down at his watch.
The numbers read 4:07.
"Is it four already?" he muttered. Then, after a beat, softer — "It really is time."
The van came to a stop. The door opened and Adrian, the team liaison, climbed out — the particular Adrian who had, by this point, been assigned to Mateo enough times that it had stopped feeling like coincidence. He was moving at a pace that suggested the afternoon had already been long, his breath coming slightly heavier than it needed to as he crossed toward them, one hand raised in a wave.
"Mateo — you're already out here, good." He reached them, rolling his shoulders. "It's time. Your apartment is ready."
"Okay." Mateo nodded. "I'll go get my remaining stuff — give me a minute."
Adrian smiled. "Of course."
Mateo's eyes moved — just briefly, just for a moment — across the faces of the people standing around him. Then he pulled them away and went inside.
Adrian, apparently unaware that he had just walked into the closing scene of something, looked pleasantly at Alejandro and the boys and gave a small, cheerful wave.
"Good afternoon."
"Good afternoon," they said back — all of them, flat, dry, unified in their lack of enthusiasm in a way that was almost musical.
Adrian nodded, unbothered, and waited by the van.
"I'm back."
He reappeared through the door not long after — and he was carrying less than anyone might have expected, which was its own kind of story. Over the last few days, people from the liaison setup had been coming through to pack and transport the bulk of his belongings, quietly and efficiently, so that this moment would not be heavier than it needed to be. What remained was simple: a backpack with his daily essentials, a small suitcase with a few clothes, and the large flask from Mrs. Rosa tucked under one arm — still warm, carried with the particular care of something recently received and already valued.
Adrian moved immediately, crossing toward him with purpose.
"Let me take those."
He collected the flask and the suitcase before Mateo could object, turned efficiently, and carried them to the van.
Mateo watched him go. Then he turned back.
"So," he said. "It's time."
The group looked at him. And for a moment — a slightly too long moment — nobody said anything particularly useful. The words that existed for occasions like this seemed to have temporarily made themselves unavailable. What came instead were the sounds of people trying to locate them.
"Well—"
"I mean—"
"I guess—"
"Yeah, so—"
Alejandro looked at them. All of them. He took in the shuffling, the unfinished sentences, the general collective failure to produce a coherent goodbye, and he let out a slow breath through his nose.
Then he rolled his eyes.
"Do you lot want to just go with him?"
Every head turned toward him at the same speed.
"REALLY?!" Balde's voice cracked slightly on the word, volume arriving before composure could catch up.
Alejandro's expression was magnificently unbothered.
"It's not as though any of you have training today," he said. He paused. "And I could genuinely use some peace and quiet around here."
The pause that followed was about a half second long.
Then the smile broke through — quiet, warm, entirely deliberate — and he looked at them properly.
"Yes," he said. "Really. You can go with him."
The noise that followed was immediate and considerable. Shouting, laughing, the sound of multiple people expressing relief through volume — thank you thank you THANK YOU arriving from several directions at once, overlapping and building, Fermín and Balde already moving like the decision had been made some time ago and they had simply been waiting for the announcement.
Then Mateo stepped forward and hugged him.
It was sudden enough that Alejandro startled — a visible, genuine flinch of surprise, his arms coming up slightly in the instinctive response of someone who had not prepared for impact.
"Thank you," Mateo said into it. Simple. Complete.
Alejandro stood still for a moment.
Then his hand came up and found the top of Mateo's head — and he rubbed it slowly, the way you touch something you are already in the process of missing.
"I'm going to miss you, kid," he said. Quietly. Just for the two of them.
Mateo's arms tightened slightly.
"I'm going to miss you too, Boss."
Alejandro let the moment exist for exactly as long as it needed to. Then, with the particular composure of a man who had already used up his emotional allowance for one evening, he gently extracted himself, straightened his collar, and looked at the group.
"Before six," he said firmly. "All of you. Back here before six."
"YES!" — from approximately five directions at once.
...
"No way he actually did that—"
The laughter came before the sentence finished, rolling through the van and bouncing off every surface. Mateo was leaning forward in his seat, shoulders shaking, the kind of laugh that had been building since someone started the story and had no intention of stopping at a reasonable point.
"I'm telling you," Casado said, barely holding himself together, "the whole thing was hilarious. I was watching it happen in real time—"
More laughter. The van wobbled with it.
Balde, in the seat across, pulled a face — the specific expression of a man who had done something that was funny in retrospect and was not fully ready to accept that yet.
"Okay, okay — it's done." He waved a hand, trying to move past it with dignity. "At least I had the courage to actually do something. I'm still way better than all of you who can't even talk to a girl without losing the ability to form sentences."
He looked around at them with mild contempt.
"I'd like to see any of you even try."
"Dude," Mateo said, still laughing, shaking his head, "don't try to turn this around. You all know my only love is football. I have no time for distractions."
Balde turned to look at him. Held the look for a moment.
Then he let out a long, slow whistle through his teeth.
"Excuses," he said simply.
"Whatever." Mateo waved him off. Then he stopped, the laugh resurfacing immediately with a new target. "But Balde — genuinely — Pep's daughter? Really?"
He looked at him. Shook his head. The disbelief was pure and unhidden.
"What?" Balde said, entirely unbothered. "It's not like she isn't a human being."
"That is such a—" Mateo pressed his hand to his face.
"Speaking of ladies—" Fermín turned in his seat, pivoting with the energy of someone who had been waiting to bring something up and had finally found his opening. His eyes landed on Mateo. "Dude. Your cousin."
Mateo's expression shifted. "Aina?"
"Yes — her." Balde sat forward immediately, any pretense of moving on from the previous topic completely abandoned. "She was nothing like how you and Gavi described her. Nothing."
Gavi, from his corner of the van, didn't look up. "She's probably still hiding her true colors."
Balde ignored this completely.
"Mateo. Give me her number."
"Ew, dude—" Mateo reached over and pushed his head away with one palm, not violently, just firmly, the way you move something that has no business being where it is.
Balde batted the hand away, still laughing. "I'm serious."
"I know you are. That's the problem."
"Her friend was also beautiful," Casado said, from the other side of the van.
The van went briefly quiet.
Mateo turned to look at him. Slowly. "Even you, Casado?"
"What?" Casado held his hands up, the picture of innocent reasonableness. "She was nice to look at. That's not my fault. I don't control what's nice to look at."
"I think her name was Olivia?" Fermín said, thinking about it.
"Olivia, yes." Balde nodded with the authority of someone who had filed this information carefully. "She was nice." He paused, the memory arriving with some additional warmth. "Actually she was the first one who came to help me carry the snacks back down, remember? When I needed an extra hand — she just came over. Didn't even hesitate."
"Of course you remember that specifically," Mateo said.
Fermín turned back to Mateo, squinting slightly. "You saw her though, right? Don't pretend you didn't notice."
Mateo shook him off, leaning back. "Everywhere was dark. I didn't see much. And after the match I wasn't in a right headspace — all I remember is hugging my mom and my nana and then going straight back in to sleep."
"Convenient," Balde muttered.
"It's true," Mateo said flatly. Then something crossed his face — a thought arriving sideways, pulling his attention in a new direction. He leaned forward toward the front of the van.
"Adrian — what's the address of where we're going?"
Adrian glanced back briefly, then answered in the easy tone of someone reading from a document he had long since memorised. "Residencial Altos de Pedralbes. Carrer de la Font del Lleó, 28 — Pedralbes, 08034, Barcelona." He checked the road ahead. "We'll be there soon, maybe two minutes tops."
Mateo nodded, pulling out his phone.
"What are you doing?" Gavi asked, watching him.
"Sending my address to my mom and to Pedri."
He typed it out — two messages, sent one after the other — then set the phone on his knee.
The word Sent had barely registered before Adrian's voice came through from the front.
"We're here."
The van slowed.
The noise inside dropped naturally as, one by one, they all turned toward the windows.
"Wow."
Someone said it first and the rest followed, a chorus of low, unscripted reactions filling the van as they took in what was outside.
Pedralbes. The light fell differently here — quieter somehow, the streets wider and tree-lined, the buildings unhurried and substantial in the way that certain parts of Barcelona simply were. It had the texture of a place that had never needed to announce itself.
Adrian pulled up to a stop in front of an apartment complex that answered the question of where a football club chose to put its players without needing to say a word about it. Clean lines, tall windows, the kind of understated elegance that costs more than things that shout about it.
"Here's your new place," Adrian said.
The van was quiet for a moment.
"Insane," Fermín said, mostly to himself.
"That's actually insane," Balde confirmed, pressing slightly toward the window.
"This is where you're living?" Casado said, looking at Mateo with an expression that contained several emotions at once.
Mateo was looking at it too. He didn't say anything immediately. He just looked — at the building, at the address, at the reality of a thing that had been abstract and future-tense for long enough that seeing it rendered in stone and glass and Barcelona evening light required a moment to properly accept.
They piled out of the van into the warm air. Adrian came around, keys in hand, already in the efficient mode of someone with a checklist to complete.
"I'll bring the bags up — you can head in." He held out a key card toward Mateo. "Stairs are on the right when you go through the main door. Your apartment is on the third floor."
Mateo took the card. His fingers closed around it.
He stood on the pavement outside his new building with a key card in his hand and his four best friends around him and looked up at the place where he was going to live, and for a moment he just let that be exactly as large as it was.
His phone vibrated.
He looked down out of reflex, thumb already moving — and found a cluster of messages waiting. He scrolled past the ones he'd deal with later and stopped on the first two.
His mother. I'll forward the address to your cousin — can they start making their way over?
He typed back without thinking. No problem, Ma.
He scrolled to the second message.
Read it.
Read it again.
His head came up fast, eyes scanning the immediate area until he found Adrian, who was at the back of the van working the suitcase free with one hand and balancing the flask carefully with the other.
"Adrian—" Mateo crossed toward him. "Pedri lives here too?"
Adrian looked up. Processed the question. "What?"
"Pedri. He just messaged me — he said this is his address."
"Oh." Adrian set the flask down on the edge of the van and nodded, the information slotting into place. "Yes — right. The complex has an arrangement with the club." He straightened up, settling into the explanation with the ease of someone who had given it before. "Any first team player who doesn't have their own property yet can move in here while they get sorted. You're on the third floor." He reached for the flask again. "Pedri's on the second. And if I remember correctly — Ansu Fati is also on the third."
The van went very quiet.
Gavi and Fermín turned to look at each other simultaneously.
"Fati too?" Gavi said.
Adrian nodded, allowing himself a small smile.
"Fati too."
...
"Wow."
It had been the word of the last ten minutes — offered repeatedly, in varying tones, by all five of them at different intervals as Adrian led them through the apartment. And yet somehow it had not gotten old, because each new room presented fresh justification for it.
For boys who had spent years measuring their personal space in dorm room dimensions — narrow beds, shared bathrooms, wardrobes that held exactly as much as they needed to and not a centimetre more — this was not just an upgrade. It was a different category of existence entirely.
The apartment was on the third floor, and it announced itself properly from the moment the door opened.
Everything was clean and considered — the kind of space that had been put together by people who knew exactly who was moving in and had taken that seriously. The walls were a warm off-white, the floors a pale hardwood that ran through the entire apartment in clean unbroken lines. The lighting was soft and deliberate, the furniture substantial without being heavy, chosen in the particular way that said comfort and quality in the same breath.
But it was the details that stopped them.
Along the hallway wall, framed and hung at careful intervals, was Mateo's career rendered in fabric and glass. Jerseys — small ones first, the tiny numbered shirts of an eight, a nine, a ten-year-old boy who had arrived at this club with everything ahead of him — progressing in size along the wall, year by year, each one framed against a clean white mount with the season printed neatly beneath. The most recent hung at the far end of the hallway: a Barcelona first team shirt, the number 9 in crisp blue and red, pressed and framed and waiting — the number he had not yet worn in a competitive match, displayed here like a quiet statement of intent, like someone in this building believed in what was coming before it had arrived.
Beside the jerseys, photographs. Some were formal — team photos from different academy years, tournament shots, presentation days. Others were candid — a younger Mateo mid-celebration on a pitch somewhere, arms wide, face completely given over to the moment. A few from even earlier, a boy who still had the rounded face of childhood holding a trophy nearly as big as he was, grinning at whoever was behind the camera.
At the end of the hallway, just before the living room opened up, a small display table had been set against the wall. On it, arranged with genuine care, sat every piece of silverware and individual award he had accumulated through his academy years — trophies of varying sizes, medals on small stands, plaques and framed certificates, the physical record of a career that had been building to something for a very long time.
Fermín stopped in front of it and stood there for a moment.
"They put all your stuff in here already," he said, not quite a question.
"They did," Adrian confirmed, coming alongside them.
Balde was still looking at the photographs on the wall, moving slowly from one to the next, reading the progression of them. "Bro," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Look at him — look how small he was."
Casado had found the framed number 9 at the end of the wall. He stood in front of it with his arms folded and looked at it for a long moment.
"That one's not from a match," he said.
"Not yet," Adrian said simply.
Gavi said nothing. He just looked at the shirt, then looked at Mateo, then looked back at the shirt. Then he nodded — once, slowly — with the expression of someone filing something away.
Mateo had been quiet since they walked in. He was looking at the wall — at all of it, the small jerseys and the photographs and the boy he had been — and there was something very still in his face. Not sad. Just full. The particular fullness of someone standing in front of evidence of their own life and needing a moment before they can properly speak.
Adrian moved them along.
The living room opened wide at the end of the hallway, generous and bright, the late afternoon light coming through the tall windows and laying itself across the room in long warm rectangles. A sofa — deep, comfortable, the kind designed to be sat in for serious lengths of time — faced the entertainment wall, where a flat screen television of considerable size was mounted and flanked on both sides by neat shelving.
On the lower shelf, arranged in a careful row, sat a stack of game cases.
Balde saw it first.
"Is that—"
He crossed the room in four steps and crouched in front of the shelf, running his eyes across the titles with the focus of a man conducting an inventory. FIFA 21. NBA 2K21. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
"They stocked it," he said, turning around with an expression that suggested this had elevated the apartment to a new tier entirely.
"Obviously they stocked it," Fermín said, already moving toward the sofa.
Adrian allowed himself a small smile.
He showed them the rest — the two bedrooms, both properly furnished, the spare one neat and waiting with the same quiet readiness as everything else. Three bathrooms, tiled cleanly, properly equipped. He guided them to the kitchen last, which was open-plan and well-fitted, the counters clear and the cupboards stocked with the organized thoroughness of someone who had been given a brief and followed it precisely.
He opened the refrigerator.
It was full. Properly, considerately full — fresh produce arranged on the upper shelves, proteins below, condiments and sauces in the door, everything a person might need to actually cook a real meal, multiple times, without a single trip to a shop.
"If you want to cook for yourself," Adrian said, "everything you'd need should be in there. They'll restock it on a schedule."
Fermín turned to Mateo with the expression of someone preparing to be sympathetic.
"Mate — do you even know how to—"
"You lot do know my family owns a restaurant, right?" Mateo said, opening the fridge door wider and looking inside with the comfortable authority of someone taking stock of an adequate kitchen. "I can cook."
The others went quiet for a moment.
"Actually," Casado said slowly, "that's true."
"We've eaten his food," Gavi said.
"It was good," Balde admitted.
Fermín pointed at the fridge. "I'm coming over for dinner."
"You're not invited," Mateo said pleasantly, and closed the fridge.
The tour eventually deposited all five of them back in the living room, where — by a process that felt entirely natural and required no discussion — FIFA 21 was located, controllers were distributed, and sides were picked with the usual combination of negotiation and mild dishonesty about preferred teams.
Mateo went to the kitchen, came back with the flask Mrs. Rosa had sent him home with, and set it in the middle of the low table. He found bowls. He ladled out the Escudella i Carn d'Olla with the reverence it deserved, and the warm, dense smell of it filled the living room of the new apartment immediately — something familiar and home-shaped settling into a space that was still learning what it was.
Adrian had begun moving toward the door with the quiet efficiency of a man whose job was technically complete.
"Adrian," Mateo said.
Adrian turned.
Mateo held out a bowl.
Adrian looked at it. Looked at the group on the sofa. Looked back at Mateo.
"I shouldn't—"
"Sit down," Mateo said. Not unkindly. Just with the particular firmness of someone who had already decided.
Adrian sat down.
Several rounds of Injustice followed — loud, contested, deeply felt, the evening outside the tall windows deepening from gold to amber to the soft blue of late dusk. Adrian turned out to be better than expected and was teased for it. Balde attempted a combination he had clearly been saving and executed it perfectly on the third try and celebrated as though he had scored a final winner. Casado won two rounds without appearing to try very hard, which annoyed everyone proportionally.
The bowl of Escudella went around twice and was discussed seriously.
It was, by general agreement, extremely good.
Eventually, the natural law of evenings asserted itself.
Adrian set his controller down and stood with the look of a man returning to himself after a very pleasant detour.
"I'll tidy up before I—"
"No, leave it," Mateo said immediately. "I've got it. You've been running around all day."
Adrian opened his mouth.
"I've got it," Mateo said again, quieter, final.
Adrian closed his mouth. Nodded. Then, in the tone of someone remembering something important — "Early start tomorrow. I'm coming to pick you up — the documentary team wants to begin with you in the morning."
"No problem," Mateo said.
Adrian gathered his things, said his goodbyes to the group, and let himself out.
Then it was just the five of them in the living room, in the easy aftermath of a good evening, controllers loose in their hands, the empty bowl on the table between them.
Mateo looked at his friends.
They looked back at him — all of them, in their different ways. Fermín with the grin that never fully left. Casado settled and calm. Balde leaning back with one arm over the back of the sofa. Gavi with his elbows on his knees, watching him with the quiet attention he reserved for moments he was actually paying attention to.
Mateo smiled.
"You'd better go," he said. "It'll be six soon."
Nobody moved immediately. For a moment they all just sat in it — in the room, in the evening, in the last minutes of a day that had been, by any measure, one worth keeping.
Then the movement started.
Balde was first — on his feet, stretching dramatically, collecting his jacket from the arm of the sofa. "Fine, fine." He knocked Mateo's shoulder once with his fist as he passed. "This place is mad, by the way. Genuinely."
"Come back anytime," Mateo said. "Except you."
"You love me," Balde said, already heading for the door.
Casado stood, smoothed his jacket, and stopped in front of Mateo with the particular expression he wore when he meant something and was going to say it simply.
"Good place," he said.
Mateo nodded. "Yeah."
"Good day."
"Yeah."
Casado smiled — small, real — and moved toward the door.
Fermín grabbed Mateo by the back of the neck and pulled him in briefly, the way he always did, loud and warm and entirely without warning.
"This is only the beginning, dude," he said, close and sincere, before releasing him and immediately becoming loud again. "Also I'm coming for dinner. I wasn't joking."
"You're not invited."
"Wednesday works for me."
He was out the door.
Gavi was last.
He had stood up slowly, and he stood now in the space between the sofa and the hallway looking at Mateo with the easy, unhurried expression of someone who had known him long enough that goodbyes did not require ceremony.
They looked at each other for a moment.
Then Gavi put his hand out.
Mateo met it.
Clap — clean and sharp. High five into the brief finger-lock, hands curling around each other for a half second before releasing. The pull-in — chests meeting in a light shoulder bump, a moment held. Step back.
Snap.
The handshake they almost never did, reserved without ever agreeing to reserve it for the moments that earned it.
Gavi stood back. His face was calm. His eyes were steady.
"Later, Mateo," he said.
Simple. Complete. The two words carrying everything the handshake had already said.
Mateo watched him turn and walk down the hallway, watched the door swing open and the evening outside receive him, watched until the door eased itself shut and the apartment went quiet.
He stood at the door for a moment.
He had expected something to arrive — the weight of it, the ache, the particular loneliness of a first night somewhere new after a day spent surrounded by everyone you loved. He had been carrying the anticipation of that feeling all afternoon, braced for it, ready to simply sit with it when it came.
But standing at the door of his apartment on the third floor of a building in Pedralbes with the last of the evening light coming through the tall windows —
He was smiling.
He shook his head slowly, the smile settling deeper.
Those guys.
He turned back into the living room, gathered the bowls from the table, and carried them toward the kitchen, moving unhurriedly through the new space, already beginning to learn the distances and angles of a place that was going to become familiar.
He had just set the bowls on the counter when the doorbell rang.
He paused.
Looked toward the hallway.
Did they forget something.
He shook his head, already moving back toward the door, already preparing his face into the particular expression reserved for friends who cannot leave properly.
He pulled it open — already half-turning back toward the kitchen, already talking—
"What did you guys forget now—"
He stopped.
The voice that came back was not Gavi's. It was not Balde's or Fermín's or Casado's.
It was soft. It was feminine.
It moved through the open doorway and reached him where he stood, and he went absolutely still.
"Hello."
A/N
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