Chapter Text
Right now, Kate was regretting everything. The decision to take this damn class, obviously. (Nevermind that it was mandatory.) Her choice of major. Her decision to end her blissful gap year (okay, years, plural) and go back to school on her mother’s insistence. Hell, even graduating high school. It had all been a mistake. Because all of it had led her here, freezing her ass off in this half-lit rink, at 6:00 in the fucking morning. This was not how she wanted to spend her Boxing Day.
Really, she rationalized, this was Clint’s fault. Oops, sorry, Professor Barton, she corrected herself mentally. She couldn’t help rolling her eyes just a little bit. To her, he had become just Clint. The familiarity she had built up after 3 years of taking his courses and irritating him almost daily had thoroughly cured her of any foolish urge to treat him like a professor instead of a friend. Albeit an old, grumpy, asshole friend who also graded her papers, bored her to sleep on occasion, and sometimes ruined her day, like he was doing right now.
She still remembered the conversation during his office hours last week, when he had made that fateful suggestion.
“Look, why don’t you cover that hockey tournament? It’s a week off, and there are teams coming from all over the world. Find yourself a nice little story there.”
“I don’t know anything about hockey,” Kate had scoffed. The only sport she had ever really cared for was archery. The scorn on her face would have discouraged almost anyone. Anyone except Clint. He was quite used to it by now. He had remained impassive.
“Then learn.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Look.” He had scrubbed a hand over his forehead, looking tired. “You haven’t pitched me anything good in the last 2 weeks. If you’ve got any better ideas, I’d love to hear them. But this is my suggestion.”
Kate never could let him have the last word. “Okay, yeah, all my other ideas were garbage, but still-”
“You asked for my advice, and you got it. Don’t bother to ask if you’re not even going to consider it. I think you should cover the tournament. Of course, you’re free to ignore my advice, and you’re also free to fail your piece this semester.” He had glanced at the calendar on the wall. “May I remind you, it’s due in 2 weeks. And I’ve already given you an extension.”
Kate had groaned and leaned back in her chair. Technically, the piece was already late; Clint had given her an extension until the start of the winter semester in January, cutting it down to the wire. God, she really missed her gap year right now. She would do anything to go back. Maybe this higher education thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Kate.” The sharpness in Clint’s voice had instantly made her sit up straighter and snap her focus back to him. “This will be good for you. Your photos are beautiful, and you’re a very talented writer, yes, but this… this capriciousness-”
She couldn’t resist a quip. “Now there’s a four dollar word.”
His glare had silenced her on the spot, and she shrank back. “I said, you’re talented,” he continued. “But you don’t always get to pick your own stories. When you’re working for a big paper - and I know you will be, if you can get your act together - you won’t get to frolic around and pick up whatever catches your eye. You will write what you’re assigned, when it’s assigned. I won’t force you today, but someday someone will, and it would do you some good to learn that sooner rather than later. Now, you can either take my suggestion, or come up with something better. That’s up to you. But don’t say I didn’t try to help.”
The reprimand had stung, and Kate slumped a little in her seat. Despite all her joking, his opinion was important to her, and his admonishments twice as painful as his praise was exhilarating. Sometimes she thought he didn’t realize how much his words meant to her, through no fault of his own. Kate would rather die than admit that anyone could have so much power over her moods. But he had said that she was talented, and that she would work for a big paper someday. Nevermind the part about getting her act together. Those words melted away in her memory, leaving only the praise standing out. There was a glimmer of hope that she could cling to.
That had all brought her here, trying to remedy her biggest problem at the moment: she was supposed to be covering a hockey tournament, and she knew jack shit about hockey.
The extent of her knowledge came from the one time her mom had dragged her to an Islanders game and she had hardly paid any attention. As far as she was concerned, the point of the game was to put the little rubber disk into the net, and everything else was secondary. People seemed to care an awful lot about that little rubber disk. If Clint were here, she knew he would say some bullshit about “expanding your horizons”. The only thing expanding was her desire to punch him in the face.
He had suggested that she visit some of the local rinks and observe as much as she could. Her busy life as a double major who was also on the archery team left her little time to sit around run-down rinks to watch teenagers slap a rubber disk around. So that left her with the early morning ice times. As unenthused as she was to be sitting on the hard wooden seats that still felt vaguely sticky from 50 years worth of spilled coffees, she was at least glad that she wasn’t the one on the ice. It struck her as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. But by some miracle or perhaps brainwashing, these players actually seemed to like it. They smiled and joked with their teammates as their coach ordered them around through drills, skating them from one end to the other, sending them through increasingly complicated twists and turns around pylons. Their chests heaved beneath their shoulder pads and rivulets of sweat trickled out from beneath their helmets. It looked positively torturous. Kate just couldn’t understand it. Really, what threw her off the most was the concept of a team.
When she was shooting, it was only her, her bow, her arrow, and the target. Her world broke down into its essential components and she was the only variable she needed to control. She never had to worry about a teammate messing up, or an opponent taking her out, or anything other than the steadiness of her own hand and the rhythmic beating of her own heart. When she let the arrow fly, she could listen to her bow sing and know that she was the only one responsible for her success. Kate liked to win, and she liked to win alone. None of this team bullshit.
But, whatever her own feelings on the matter were, she couldn’t deny that these kids looked happy. It mystified her. When the coach called them in at the end of practice, and they all knelt and looked up at him with red faces shining with sweat, Kate figured she was done. She slapped her notebook shut, its creamy pages unmarred, and shouldered her bag. All she had to show for her time was a crick in her neck and a numbness in her frozen feet. She hadn’t learned anything about hockey. She certainly wasn’t “getting a feel for the game”, whatever that meant.
Her phone buzzed, and she fumbled to pull it from her pocket. But the sour expression on her face lifted ever so slightly when she saw the notification, or rather, who it was from.
Greer: have you started your semester piece yet??
Kate rolled her eyes as she typed back:
Kate: ugh don’t remind me
Kate: no i haven’t started
Kate: but i have this going for me
Kate: [1 image attached]
Kate sent a photo of the rink to the groupchat with her two best friends. Only moments later, Franny chimed in, though Kate had to wonder what they were both doing up so early. She could only hope she hadn’t woken them.
Franny: wtf are you doing
Kate: idek blame clint
Greer: KATE stop procrastinating
Kate: it’s like you don’t even know me smh
She shoved her phone back into her pocket and left the rink, hunching her shoulders against the chilly air outside. She had been right all along. This was a terrible idea. Absolutely nothing could change her mind.
***
When Yelena stepped off the plane, she should have felt excited. A little nervous, even. She would have much preferred that. Anything would have been better than the churning in her gut. Instead, she felt a cold stone settle inside her, weighing her down. It wasn’t quite fear. It was more like dread. That was only compounded when she felt her coach’s iron grip squeeze her shoulder and the sound of his breath right behind her. She froze and did not turn around. Her heartbeat was a river rushing in her ears.
“We’re here to win, aren’t we?” His breath was hot and sour next to her ear. She suppressed a shudder and tried not to think about it.
“Yes,” she answered.
“You will address me properly.”
“Yes, Coach.”
“Now say it.”
“We’re here to win.” Her voice did not shake.
“Good,” he whispered. “Don’t disappoint me.”
She was all too aware of the brilliant red C over the heart of her team jacket. She was half-convinced it was going to burn through and brand its impression onto her skin, marking her for life. She wanted to claw it off. Damn how long and hard she had worked for that C. The burden wasn’t worth it. Dreykov’s hand pressed the weight of the world down onto her shoulders, and it seemed to take eons for him to finally remove it. When he did, she tried not to sigh too obviously in relief. He walked off ahead of her as if he had never said anything, always insisting on being the one to lead the team through the gates.
His team. No, her team. She was team captain. They belonged to her, and she belonged to them. Not to him. There were some things he could not own. He might be the one commanding their every move from the bench, but they were the ones who were actually out on the ice, making all his beloved victories happen. He couldn’t take that away from her. Yelena tried to remind herself of this as she stepped out into the terminal and steeled herself for the tournament ahead.
She would win. Not for him, because he told her to. But because winning was what she always did. She didn’t know anything else. Once she was on the ice, nothing else would matter. She couldn’t wait to lace up her skates and lose herself in the game. The dread curdling in her stomach turned to anticipation. The tournament couldn’t come soon enough.