Chapter Text
The words of affirmation, Holster thinks, is gonna be the most obvious one. It must be. Like, sure, they exchange compliments every now and then but he found a website with some examples of the things you have to say and he’s never said any of that to Ransom. It’s stuff like, ‘you mean the world to me’ and ‘I love being in love with you’. He even sees one that’s all, ‘you smell delicious’ which is totally creepy and not what he wants to be aiming for in any way.
Most of them are for when you’re already in a relationship, evidently, and those are not something he can easily segue into during normal bro conversations.
(He can’t say, ‘you are gorgeous’, even though Ransom definitely is.
He can’t say, ‘I can’t get enough of you’ because that’s a bit too close to what he’s still too chicken to admit out loud.
And he definitely can’t say, ‘you’re the love of my life’ even though he thinks that might just be true.)
He still finds a few pointers and is able to adapt some of the examples into sentences which he thinks fit the way he feels without being too blatantly like a confession. They’re slightly on the edge of uncomfortable, of laying everything bare, but he supposes they’ll have to be if he wants to get his point across.
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Holster is admittedly too scared to use those straight out the gate so he decides to start small. Just putting a bit more feeling into the ordinary stuff, the yells on the ice and the back slaps in the locker room. But as Ransom continues being oblivious, he has to up his game.
That was a damn beautiful pass, he says, gentler than normal, on the bench after Ransom got a lovely assist on one of Jack’s goals. His heart swells when Ransom smiles and ducks his head and shoves at his arm and responds, couldn’t have done it without your sweet takeaway, bro.
You make me smile, he says when Ransom asks why he’s grinning through his pancakes during their pre-game breakfast. He can feel the syrup dripping down his chin. Ransom rolls his eyes.
I don’t know what I’d do without you, he says, more serious than normal, after Ransom helps him figure out a problem with his skates that’s making his ankle twinge when he changes direction backwards. You’d probably die or something, Ransom replies, eyes twinkling, but he taps Holster’s pads with his stick as he heads for the locker room and Holster knows his meaning got across.
You look great, he says once he’s recovered himself from the sight of Ransom in a tight buttoned shirt and well-fitted slacks, and he manages to keep down the bile that rises when he realises that it’s one hundred percent a date outfit.
You always look great, he adds lamely as Ransom walks out the door and he can’t be sure whether it was loud enough to be heard. He can’t be sure whether he wanted it to be heard.
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It’s during a totally routine study session (routine now that Holster’s realised it’s the best way for either of them to get any work done) that Holster realises something that sort of makes his love languages thing worth every cent even without reaching the original goal. He doesn’t know how he would have noticed otherwise.
He’s just doing what’s become almost habit at this point; complimenting his best friend.
“You’re the smartest person I know,” he says when Ransom starts second-guessing his choice of classes. “You’re, like, amazing. No way you don’t smash this paper.”
And sure, it’s a bit too much perhaps for their relationship, less bros than a lot of the stuff he’s said, even recently, but he doesn’t think it’s too out of character so he doesn’t get it when Ransom raises an—annoyingly attractive—eyebrow at him.
“What do you want, Holts?” he says, a resigned tone in his voice. And, like—that’s not what Holster intended at all.
“What?” he manages. When all Ransom does is raise his eyebrow even further, Holster figures it out.
“You think I’m complimenting you to like, butter you up?” he splutters. “To get something in return?”
“Uh, yeah?” Ransom says, like it’s obvious.
No, no, no, no, no. This is all wrong. He’s meant to realise that Holster loves him, not think he owes something for all the compliments.
Not think that Holster is exaggerating, or, G-d forbid, lying, just to get something in return.
Holster can’t believe he missed his best friend developing an insecurity like that. Does he really not tell Ransom how amazing he is often enough to get it through the guy’s skull? He certainly thinks it, that and an embarrassing amount more. Maybe he should start speaking his mind. Put it right, make it evident how far from lying he actually is. That he’s actually downsizing his overgrown feelings for fear of making Ransom uncomfortable.
He imagines waking Ransom up in the morning and telling him exactly how adorable he looks with his face smushed into the pillow.
Sitting across from him at breakfast and waxing lyrical about his specialty blueberry pancakes and how his shoulders look in that apron he wears when he cooks.
Running into his arms after a win and just telling him how much he loves every single thing about him, his hockey and his brain and his beautiful face, every little detail, down to the way he twiddles his stick when they're waiting for puck drop or the way he taps his pen against Holster's nose if he zones out while they're studying—and laughs all bright and sunny when Holster startles.
Maybe he shouldn’t, actually, say everything he wants to. But he can at least say some of it.
So he does. The ‘words of affirmation’ gig is always in the back of his mind, but far from his goal, because he knows this isn’t going to be a temporary thing. This is a paradigm shift, a fundamental change, because Ransom’s apparently spent their entire friendship unaware of how awesome Holster thinks he is, and Holster can’t have that. Not at all.
He leaps back into the same shit with fervour, except his underlying motive has changed to the point where there’s far less of the awkward segues into half-formed love confessions, and far more of the standard bro compliments—only with extra meaning behind them.
He makes sure to pick up on every clever play and every slick pass, makes sure to yell himself hoarse about goals and good test results so that Ransom knows just how much he’s appreciated. It’s—well, it’s fun, actually. Seeing the pleased responses he gets in return once it’s been long enough to be obvious to Ransom that he’s not angling for favours.
No way in hell is he gonna stop this, not even when he moves onto the next love language, not even when he didn’t gain any ground on the whole ‘telling Ransom he loves him’ thing. That takes a back seat to his best friend being appreciated the way he deserves. Which sounds sappy as hell, but Holster doesn’t care. It’s one of the things he always expected to come of being in love: the selfless desire for the person’s happiness, at the expense of literally anything else.
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His mom used to say loving someone is like an itch, the constant need to see them happy. Only soothed by the sound of their laugh or the sight of their smile. Holster gets that, he does. But he’s never understood it, not really, because he doesn’t think he had loved anyone like that, before Ransom; and with him it’s always been more—
Well, he can hardly describe it.
—it’s like during winters, the ones that happen a lot in Buffalo, the ones that stretch out like they’ll never end. And Holster isn’t kidding anyone, he loves winter and first snowfall and skating on frozen lakes, but he's always hated the way the sun won’t come out for weeks, hated the feeling of waiting for the slightest drop of sunlight, a hunger that used to almost consume him. His mom likes to call him a child of the sun, addicted to it.
The feeling he gets when the sun is shining on him again, that’s what it’s like for him. That’s the feeling he gets when Ransom’s so happy it shows on the surface.
So Ransom’s smile is his light in the darkness, whatever. More like light in the dreariness of northern winters, but that’s hardly less cliché. Sometimes Holster feels like he should be embarrassed by what Ransom’s done to him, turned him into.
But in the end he wouldn’t change it for the world, not with the way Ransom smiles at him when he brings out the compliments.