#also general hand waving about jack's road to uga bc after like 10 searches i was tired of reading NCAA guidlines

[loveintvworlds]

Eric Bittle ends up at UGA despite his best wishes because Samwell is expensive, and sure, UGA is too but. Not so much when your daddy is the football coach. Eric at UGA is a little rougher around the edges, a little more short tempered. He’s still friendly, still outgoing, still an athlete, (he runs track) he’s still him but he spent all of high school holding on to the idea of getting out of Georgia at the end of it, and losing that little bit of hope would take a toll on anyone.

Campus is bigger than the whole of Madison, and more accepting too. Not by much, it’s not like how he built Samwell up to be in his head (Eric still has dreams about “1 in 4, maybe more”) but he sees more out gay people in his first few weeks on campus than he’s ever seen in his entire life. But, he also sees his daddy’s football boys, his daddy’s friends and colleagues, his daddy himself. And he — maybe irrationally — feels like they see him too, like they’re always watching. So he stays closeted, and it hurts like hell.

Jack Zimmermann ended up playing college football nearly on a whim. After the overdose hockey was too painful, it wasn’t worth his life, but he couldn’t live as anything other than an athlete. One night, while blindly hitting buttons on the remote after turning the tv on to a hockey game, and he landed on a football game instead. He saw cleats instead of skates, soft turf instead of hard ice, a game just rough enough to make his skin buzz pleasantly but not enough for anyone to compare him to Bad Bob, enforcer extraordinaire.

So he spent the year learning football. When he started applying to colleges he applied to schools in warm climates, and meticulously avoided cities with hockey teams. Without a high school football career to get him scouted, Jack played at a D2 school his freshman year. But Jack Zimmermann would be D1 material at any sport he put even a fraction of his energy into, so he transfers to UGA, spends sophomore year benched (the NCAA compliance officer was very apologetic to the football coaching staff but no, they couldn’t make an exception for Jack) and his junior year is his first real year on the team.

It’s also the year the coach’s son gets to UGA.

Plenty of people on the staff and the team know Eric, have been eating his and his mother’s baked goods at team events for years, but Jack must have been too busy glaring at his red vest and sulking near the benches to notice. Then he was too busy acclimating to actually being on the team.

About halfway through his fall semester junior year, Jack notices.

He sees Eric on the side of the field one day, arms crossed and sunglasses on as he talks to his father. He’s got on a UGA windbreaker and duffel bag, and Jack doesn’t know what sport he plays but he knows an athletes when he sees one. The guys on the field with Jack mess up a passing drill that Jack himself was hardly paying attention to, and the ball rolls to Eric’s feet. Coach barks out a reprimand to Johnson for the fumbled throw, and Johnson — bizarrely — winks at Jack as soon as Coach looks away. Jack looks back at coach, brows furrowed, just in time to hear him say, “Junior, why don’t you show these boys how a football’s meant to be thrown.”

Eric frowns, he hems and haws, but eventually submits, like he always does with Coach. He shifts his stance, conscious of the teams eyes on him, of his daddy’s eyes, and takes a deep breath before launching the ball across the field back towards the players. He watches with more relief than pride when it flies beautifully, and manages to smile more than grimace when a few of the guys who know him hoot and holler good-naturedly.

Jack watches the whole thing and his mouth goes dry.

He thinks about that pass, about Eric, for days afterward. He sees Eric on campus one day, saying goodbye to a bunch of guys from the track and field team who were spending one of their few free days lounging in the shade of a tree. Jack watches Eric spilt from the group and start in his direction and makes a split second decision to try and catch his attention.

Jack stammers out a hello and manages to say his own name without much trouble and Eric graces him with one of his kind smiles in return, laughingly telling him that he’s well aware of who his daddy’s new favorite player is. Jack is too starry eyed to catch the edge in his voice when he says it. So he — harmlessly, unknowingly, more as an attempt at a friendly joke than anything — mentions the pass from the other day, asks him why he’s not on the team with an arm like that. And Eric (short tempered, rough around the edges, hurt, hurt, hurt, Eric) ices him out. He drops his smile, he walks away without a word.

Eric doesn’t know yet that Jack Zimmermann is a former hockey wunderkind, that Jack switched to football to get away from hockey the same way Eric switched to track to get away from football. He doesn’t know that Jack would understand the way he has to push his body to quiet his mind. That Jack understands so well because at one point things got too quiet. Eric doesn’t know yet that Jack Zimmermann isn’t just another one of his daddy’s boys waiting and watching for him to crumble. But he’ll find out soon.