Summary: After a difficult session of olaball practice, Naomi goes to Mateo for help, only to get a completely different form of it.
Naomi stomped through the palace halls, irritation simmering under her skin. She'd pulled off her sweatband shortly after leaving the arena and was still clenching the damp fabric in her fist, like if she just squeezed it hard enough it could bolster Team Avalor's odds.
How could Gabe be so completely, impossibly awful at olaball?
He should have been a natural at it; he was big, strong, coordinated in a fight, all things that should have contributed to his olaball playing ability. She'd always taken him to be the jock type, between his dedication to the royal guard and his general bravado. But apparently, that didn't translate to sports. Whether Elena was training him or not, if they wanted even a remote chance of not getting humiliatingly crushed by Cariza, they'd need a miracle.
She'd been so distracted by disappointment that she hadn't even realized that she'd asked the coach driver to take her back to the palace instead of the docks right away. So now, she paced the halls, willing herself to pull it together before she went home and baffled her poor dad to death. It was just a game. It wasn't that big a deal. Not like it was her first chance to participate as an Avaloran in the eyes of another country or anything like that. She could live.
Letting out an annoyed sigh, she paused and leaned against the wall, stretching the headband between her hands and staring through the doorway across from her. Her march through the palace had carried her all the way to the library. Inside, a thin stripe of warm, gold light cut across the floor, leaking out from the gap in the painting that concealed Mateo's workshop.
Bitterness blossomed into hope in Naomi's chest, and she released the headband with a satisfying snap. Maybe miracles were a bit much to ask for, but she did know someone with magic.
She slipped into the library. Squeezing her fingers into the opening at the side of the painting, she quietly pried it open and poked her head in. Mateo was bent over his worktable, one hand tracing down the page of a spell book and the other carefully adding seeds to a vial of garishly blue liquid, one by one. The rest of the table was laid out with a collection of vials of mystery ingredients—tiny leaves shaped like hands, a pale liquid that roiled unheated and filled its bottle with smoke, something that looked suspiciously like a tangle of dried worms. Naomi suppressed a shudder, but knew she was probably pulling a face anyway. Magic could be fascinating, especially the way Mateo talked about it, but it turned out to be pretty weird sometimes, too.
Mateo didn't so much as look up as Naomi slid further into the room and shut the painting behind her. She leaned against the edge of the short corridor into the main room, trying to look casual. "Hey, Mateo!"
The pellet between his fingers shot up into the air as he flinched and gripped it too tightly, and he made a frantic grab for it with a small, distressed sound only to launch it across the room instead. It skittered across the floor, bouncing and rolling its way somewhere into the opposite corner. Naomi pressed her lips together to swallow a laugh, trying to look innocent as he sighed heavily and turned his unamused expression on her.
His eyes flicked up and down her body, taking in the sight of the uniform, and before she could so much as draw breath to apologize, he announced, "I'm not going to use magic to help Gabe cheat at olaball."
Naomi's posture slipped against the corner and she lurched to right herself. She gaped at him, eyes jumping between the vial and his face. "Uh, that's not a mind-reading potion you're working on, by any chance, is it?"
Mateo laughed and smirked. "No, but Luisa was in here twenty minutes ago asking about that same thing." His smirk faded into a disapproving frown, though, and he raised an eyebrow at her. "You did know I'd say 'no', right? Magic isn't a shortcut." He turned back to his potion and carefully corked the vial. "And cheating is wrong," he added, almost as an afterthought, sparing one last glance in Naomi's direction.
"I know, I know," she sighed, drooping against the wall. "But we're desperate to pull our team together and at this point I feel ready to try anything. Gabe's a total disaster!"
"Wow. He's really that bad?"
"I'd believe it if he'd never even seen an olaball before today." Sighing again, Naomi finally crossed the threshold into the workshop and dropped into the wooden chair in the corner, suspiciously similar to the one in Mateo's old basement workshop. It was no more comfortable than its twin, the back digging into her shoulders and her arms catching on a splinter, but after a day of olaball and annoyance, it was at least a relief to be off her feet.
She watched as Mateo circled his work table and dropped to his knees to start pawing around for the lost kernel as she elaborated. "He can barely kick the ball, and when he does, he can't kick it straight. He fumbled every single shot we sent his way, and he spent half the practice lying on the ground because he either got knocked over or just fell down on his own."
Mateo didn't look up, invested as he was in his search, but he nodded in acknowledgement as he listened. "So are you just here to rant about Gabe?"
"It's rant worthy," Naomi retorted. "Seriously, you should have seen him. I mean, even you're better at olaball than him!"
He snapped his head upward at that, face scrunched up in offense. "What do you mean, even me?"
"Oh, you know what I mean." Waving a dismissive hand, she rocked the chair back so that it leaned against the wall. "You're not exactly the sporty type, but even you can at least pass the ball." An idea suddenly snapped into place in her head, and she dropped the chair forward onto the stone with a resounding clack. "Say, Mateo, you can pass an olaball."
"I'm not taking Gabe's place on the team, either."
Naomi swore, slumping back in the chair again, and Mateo had the gall to actually cackle at her reaction.
"Luisa asked me that, too," he admitted, still snickering. Shooting her one last amused look, he returned to his search, running his hand along the seam between the floor and the nearest counter. "But even if I was, as you said, 'the sporty type', I'm way too busy right now to practice for something this big."
"So you don't make any more potions tonight; big deal," Naomi said. "What are you even working on that's so demanding?"
"A decoy potion for the gardener. He says something's been eating all the tomatoes, so we want to give it something else to snack on instead. Once these seeds sprout, the potion should make them more interesting to whoever our little troublemaker is, and they'll hopefully keep its attention long enough to trap. Aha! There you are!" He held the stray seed up in the light like it was some kind of delicate treasure, and then stood, brushing off his knees. "Anyway, he wants to get these in the ground tomorrow morning, so I have to finish up this potion tonight. And since we need them to grow fast, too, I'll have to add a secondary effect, and I've never done that before, so..."
Naomi sighed. "Okay, okay, I get the picture."
"Besides," Mateo went on as he returned to his work table, "you've played olaball with me. You know I'm only okay, at best."
She slid further down in the chair. "'Only okay' is still better than terrible," she muttered. "Maybe you could just sub in tomorrow, then, if Gabe hasn't gotten any better tonight."
"I think my mom would have a heart attack if she saw me doing something that dangerous." It was a polite enough refusal, but a tense edge was starting to creep into his voice, and Naomi caught the brief flash of annoyance that crossed his face in his raised brows and his flat mouth.
She found herself protesting on principle, anyway. "Olaball's not that dangerous!"
Mateo frowned and looked up from his work again, jabbing a finger toward his face. "The last time I played with you, you gave me a black eye!"
"That was an accident!" She threw her hands up. "And we weren't even playing when that happened! Ugh, look, maybe she'd be excited that her son helped Avalor bring home the glory of the Peace Festival olaball trophy, despite the danger?"
"She used to make me wear a helmet when I played chess." He sighed out an exasperated sound and popped the vial open again, returning to dropping seeds in. "Sorry, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life getting lectured about the hazards of concussions."
Naomi narrowed her eyes. "...You're totally making up that chess thing."
"You don't know my mom."
She leaned heavily on the armrest, propping her chin up on her knuckles and drumming her other hand against her leg. Deep down, she knew that the team was going to be stuck with Gabe no matter what she said—once Elena set her mind on something, it was impossible to convince her to do otherwise, and Elena was dead set on Gabe's participation—and she knew that she was being obnoxious by continuing to press the issue with Mateo, but some strongly-rooted stubbornness kept her clinging to the idea anyway.
"Whoever wins this game will basically be the coolest people in the kingdom," she said. "You could be a part of that."
It was a dirty move, given his history, but it was the first thing that seemed to give Mateo pause. He tilted his head like he was considering it, but quickly shook away whatever he was thinking with a quiet huff. "Sorry, but it's still a 'no'. Besides, this seems like it would be really important to Gabe, and I don't want to take that away from him."
Naomi opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut, dropping back against the chair with a groan. "How am I supposed to argue against something as sappy as that?"
"You're not supposed to," Mateo replied, grinning.
"Okay, fine. You win. I'll be supportive of our friend."
Looking far too proud of his victory, no matter how trivial it really was, Mateo tore open a second package of seeds and carefully shook them out onto the table. They popped and clicked against the stone as they landed, and he kept a hand behind them to keep them from rolling away.
"So, do you think you'll be too busy to even come watch the game?" Naomi asked. "I know you'd probably rather just stay here, but the game by itself probably won't take too long." Especially if Cariza obliterated them the way she was expecting.
"I was planning on it. On watching, I mean," he quickly clarified, "Not on staying here. Even if I'm not playing myself, all my friends are on Avalor's team, so I wouldn't want to miss it."
'All my friends' was unexpected—was his social circle really still just the three of them?—but Naomi didn't have time to fully unpack it before he continued.
"I made sure that I'd be free tomorrow afternoon. It's kind of why I'm trying to get as much of this done now as I can." He swept his hand over the worktable, gesturing to the in-progress potion. "Everything should be done in time." He scratched the back of his neck. "I think."
"You want help with anything?" Naomi offered.
Mateo blinked, surprised, and with his attention on her, managed to set his hand back down directly in the middle of the seed pile. They flew in every direction, scattering across the floor in an asynchronous, ticking chorus and settling out of sight in every shadowy nook. Mateo didn't even watch them go; he just kept staring at Naomi, his mouth in a tight line, like he couldn't decide if he wanted to laugh or cry.
It was an easy choice for Naomi. She muffled her laughter against her hand, unable to stop an undignified snort from slipping out as Mateo let out a resigned sigh through his nose.
"Yeah," he finally managed, "I can think of a few things you could do."
"You got it, boss," she said with a mock salute, and still giggling, she joined him in the search.
The two of them crawled around on the floor to scrounge up the lost seeds. Whatever path Mateo was searching dragged him closer to Naomi, and they nearly knocked heads twice while reaching for the same seeds (to the tune of a hasty string of apologies from Mateo) before she deliberately scooted herself to the other end of the room. Perhaps it was better he'd declined her spontaneous team offer. Knowing him, he'd get distracted partway through the game and crash headlong into his own teammates. They were more efficient after that, working in a companionable silence. Naomi had gathered up a sizable handful of the pellets when Mateo spoke up again.
"So does it really matter that much if you guys don't win tomorrow?"
"Um, yes?" Naomi threw him an incredulous look from across the room. He didn't even lift his head to catch it.
"I just thought sports were supposed to be about having fun," he replied.
"Spoken like someone who never won a lot at sports," she shot back. He looked up this time, his nose wrinkled in a pout. "C'mon, where's your sense of Avaloran spirit? Your cultural pride?"
"In my spellbooks, mostly, not the sporting arena. Obviously I'm going to be rooting for you guys tomorrow, but that you considered cheating…" He frowned and stood back up to deposit the seeds he'd collected on the table. Mateo wasn't all that tall, but with her still on the floor, he seemed towering, and the disapproval in his voice made her feel even smaller.
"I know," she tried. "I wasn't being serious."
"I mean, you're not even Avaloran."
Naomi winced. She knew he didn't mean it as an insult, but it dug into the heart of the problem with startling efficiency.
"...I know. That's kinda why I want to help Avalor win." Sitting back on her heels, she stared down at the seeds rolling around on her palm. "I want to be part of the team. I want people to see me as part of the team."
Mateo studied her for a moment. From the corner of her eye, Naomi could see him shifting his feet as he weighed his next words. "Somehow, I don't think people will see you that way if you have to lie to make it happen." His voice was not unkind, but Naomi found herself feeling abashed anyway, her head drooping even lower. "Besides, you're still going to be on the team, even if we lose, right? I feel like supporting us even when we mess up is probably the most important thing. I mean," Naomi could hear the teasing smile in his voice, and she looked up to confirm it on his face, "it's not like I'm going to stop cheering for you guys even when you start falling over yourselves."
She scoffed, the sound coming out more like a laugh. "Oh please, you could have at least a little faith in us."
"I have had two separate people in here in the last half hour telling me it's basically hopeless."
"Okay, fair." Chuckling again, she curled her fingers around the seeds and made to stand, pausing as Mateo reached a hand down to her.
"So, go and prove us all wrong tomorrow," he said, and Naomi took his hand with a smile.
Mateo the next afternoon: Naomi what the heck you told me he was bad at this
Naomi: ?
Anyway, kinda rude of them to be gossiping about Gabe when he hasn't even shown up in the fic yet to defend himself. He'll appear soon I promise, but right now he remains a bit of a cryptid.
On another note, I've always kinda wondered what Mateo was up to that episode, and for that matter, what his work looks like when he's not doing Plot Relevant stuff. Does he just kinda like... do odd jobs around the palace? Does he just do independent research? Does he get into regular battles with Doña Paloma as he tries to fend her off while buying potion supplies? The world may never know.
Fun fact! The dialog from when Naomi enters the workshop to when she finally concedes is actually some of the first text I wrote for this fic, way back when (some edits aside). Despite that, this was actually one of the last chapters I finished writing. Funny how that works out sometimes.