Work Text:
“Believing takes practice.”
–A Wrinkle in Time
Ted texts, after. Simple things, usually, pleasantries made no less genuine by being commonplace, How goes the job search? and Saw the Richmond library has got some new kids’ programming, thought Miss Maisie might be a fan and A real biscuit, where I come from accompanied by a photo of a dangerously endearing disastrous kitchen counter featuring something Trent can’t resist referring to as scone-like.
Still, Trent can picture this story, some well-worn parable, a mirror to the one about Hank: this half-feral journo bit Ted’s heart out and spit it at his feet, only for Ted to pick the tattered organ up and hand-feed it to him. As with every other strange and thrilling thing about him, Ted doesn’t seem to realize there are other options beyond the response he selects, or considers them so unactionable as to be fiction; Ted just can’t seem to keep from loving things that hurt him, or else doesn’t want to, and Trent’s not sure which is worse.
So: Ted texts, and Trent keeps his distance. Nothing so gauche as ghosting him, but not giving Ted much space to breathe life into the conversation, either. He tries to keep himself too distracted to talk himself out of it.
The job helps; he hasn’t been this busy, this thrillingly overwhelmed, since he was fresh out of uni. He’s working, unexpectedly or completely predictably depending on whether you ask his former boss or his father, in promotion and outreach for a mental health organization, although that isn’t the language they use—service users, survivors, psychiatrized disability, a thousand fault lines in the system at which to pry and pray it’ll crumble magnificently: Trent’s compiling a new vocabulary, hoarding phrases he snatches from research and blog posts and conversations with his co-workers. Most of whom carry an undisguised wariness towards him, which he’ll admit he’s relieved by. He feels less dangerous around folks who know how to steer clear of teeth, who wouldn’t be afraid to punch his in if it came to it.
Not that he’s associating them with violence—and Christ, every day he’s dancing around land mines of stigma like a fucked-up middle-aged marionette, too proud and terrified to bear the thought of cocking it up and inevitably putting his foot in it anyway.
“At least you’ve got nice shoes,” Zoe, who for some reason has continued to tolerate his presence after xyr compulsory stint at showing him the ropes ended, tells him, deadpan. “Oughta take the edge off.”
“I assure you it does not,” Trent says, but he feels less like an interloper every time he talks to xem, more like an accomplice. A scant few centimeters closer to the person he wants to be, which is at once wildly depressing and enough to keep him going.
His boss, Jordan, had wasted no time talking around the situation: “This is Trent, the new writer, and I know youse don’t need much more of an introduction because I was there for all the shit we talked last month. Still, he’s here now, and even if he’s done some fucked-up shit, we can all agree he was bloody good at it, so if you’ve an inclination to give him half a chance, maybe consider it, yeah? And keep any convincing him of how he fucked up to after work hours, because if I let youse start billing that we’ll go bankrupt in a week.”
“I do know I fucked up,” Trent had told them later, after he’d shaken a couple hands and exchanged a couple nods and respected a lot of cold shoulders. Jordan had studied him for a long moment, twirling a pen in their thick fingers.
“You know that you fucked up,” they’d said, gaze serious but not unkind. “You don’t know how, yet. You’re gonna learn some things about the system you’ve upheld that’re gonna incapacitate you with guilt and grief, and all I ask is that you not make it anyone out there’s problem.” They gestured with the pen towards the space outside their office, where the organization’s handful of employees were still gathered around the kettle, chatting. “Nobody’s paid enough for that.”
“Understood,” Trent had said, nodding stiffly. Christ, he must be twice their age and still more nervous than his first day in a real newsroom during uni. “I’ll, ah, be sure not to make it anyone in here’s, either.”
Their mouth had quirked up slightly when they nodded, which he’d appreciated even as its proximity to pity sat strangely in his mouth. “Contrary to what you’ll see on Twitter, we’re not unsupportive of therapy, if that’s your thing, so.” They’d shrugged, tapping the end of their pen soundlessly on the desk. “Let me know if you ever want suggestions.”
“Ah, thank you,” Trent had said, employing that same unfamiliar nod, like a doll whose joints had rusted in place from disuse. The metallic man with no heart, and all that. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
That was, of course, far from the last time he’s felt wrongfooted around here. He’d thought himself reasonably familiar with conversations surrounding mental health, before writing The Article but especially after it; he isn’t about to broadcast his various and sundry neuroses to the world at large, but nor has he ever shied from a direct question from his father or a pointed remark by his best mate. He knows the difference between self-care that’s marketable for corporations and the real stuff, what’ll sustain him. He talks to his daughter about identifying her feelings, how none of them are good or bad but all of them can teach her something, and he tries to be open about his own in turn.
This, though, the strategies and words and lenses used by his new colleagues, the fear and fury and pride, all equally fierce, which refuse to be easily digestible—it’s wholly, incredibly new to him, like learning how to hold a pencil for the first time. He can feel blisters forming at the edges of his former perception of the world, to be replaced by skin that bears new weight without breaking open, as strange as it is strong.
He shouldn’t be surprised by how much he likes it.
Time has, of course, proven Jordan right; the past months have taught Trent to weep more than he thought possible. To bear witness to all manner of pain and rage, and talk down his own thorny shame until it fuels action rather than defensiveness. He buys most of his coworkers a pint, and in Zoe’s case, a meal; “You need to hear this, and I don’t trust anywhere else to tell it right, but I’m not about to do this shit for free,” xe had said, and laid out in no uncertain terms how the horror show Trent had dragged Ted through was society’s response to arguably the least stigmatized condition, and here’s how much worse it would’ve been for the rest of us, how you would’ve invited the system that’s already pulverized us as best it can to chew us up and spit us back out some more.
“One more thing,” xe had asked at the end of that night, meeting his eyes from the other side of the table. “Is this some sort of penance?”
Trent had turned his fork over in his hands for a long moment before answering. “No. That’d imply some sort of expiration date, a debt that could be repaid. This… maybe not this job, but this work, is the rest of my life. And what I did to Ted, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing someone can make up for. You just have to keep living with it.”
Zoe had nodded, gaze steady and unreadable, and hasn’t raised the topic since. The next time xe invites him to dinner, it’s for xyr birthday.
The next time Trent discusses one of his articles with Ted Lasso, Ted’s the one sending the link.
Not sure that I’ll be telling the good Doc Sharon about all this anti-psychiatry business anytime soon, he writes, and Trent can hear the precision with which Ted would shape the word, can taste it, but. It’s fascinating stuff. You sure do have a way with words, Trent Crimm.
Another message: Didya find it, then? Something deeper?
You tell me, Trent thinks. You know, he sends, I think I just might have.
He loved writing about football because he loves writing and football, but this is undeniably different, more than the sum of its subject and verb. His former profession has, at least, prepared him for some of the comments they get; the org certainly doesn’t have the budget for a designated moderator, so he spends at a minimum the first and last half-hour of his workday deleting the latest sanist bullshit.
He leaves the ones calling him a hypocrite. In the interest of transparency, he says; Zoe calls him a masochist.
Zoe is also the reason he finally ends up at dinner with Ted Lasso: upon reading the latest invite text over his shoulder, xe had clapped him on the back and told him not to be paternalistic and to let the man make his own mistakes, and Trent didn’t have anything to say to that, so a week and a half later, he finds himself on the other side of a booth from a beaming Ted.
“Feels like I haven’t seen you in forever,” Ted says, and Trent smiles tightly and does not say that it’s been an infinity the width of 253 days. He asks, instead, about the team, Henry, how the pressroom has been in his absence.
“Do you miss it?” Ted asks, and Trent tilts his head and considers. I miss seeing you like that, he thinks, the way you’d weave a story and conduct that hostile audience like an orchestra, but no, he doesn’t miss the job, and he says as much.
“You asked me what I loved, once,” he says once their plates are cleared and their tankards are empty and they’re winding down to the inevitable departure and separation. He looks up from the table, meets Ted’s eyes. “I really think I’ve found it.”
“You know what, Trent Crimm,” Ted says, “I think I just might’ve, too.” So it shouldn’t be a surprise when, after insisting on walking him home, Ted cranes his neck to make sure no five-year-old is peering through the windows and sets his warm, broad hand so gently on Trent’s jaw and asks to kiss him.
Trent lets him make his own mistakes.