On This Rock

by olympus_mons

Summary:

When an NHL team loses far more often than it wins, a smart general manager will trigger a rebuild, a complete overhaul of the team's roster, strategy, and personnel.

Generally speaking, there are five steps to any rebuild.

1. Identify the problems
2. Excise the rot
3. Acquire better assets
4. Set a new foundation
5. Start praying

A rebuild is a brutal, necessary business decision for the survival of the team.

Nobody knows more about surviving brutal, necessary decisions than Kent Parson.

Chapter 1

Summary:

In which the Aces lose games, Kent loses teammates, and maybe also his mind

Generally speaking, there are five steps to any rebuild.

1. Identify the problems
2. Excise the rot
3. Acquire better assets
4. Set a new foundation
5. Start praying

Generally speaking, following these five steps will get every team close enough to the Holy Grail of hockey that they can taste silver. Generally speaking, a team which has won it before will win it again (except Toronto, but that’s their cross to bear). Entering a rebuild is a humbling experience, but the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Surviving a rebuild is an epic feat, but cresting that hill, climbing that mountain, raising that cup sky high, that’s the real work.

A rebuild is a brutal, necessary business decision for the survival of the team.

Nobody knows more about surviving brutal, necessary decisions than Kent Parson.

---

Step One: Identify The Problems

The Aces are not winning.

It’s the beginning of October, and they’ve won three games out of twelve: Arizona, San Jose, and Seattle fall to the Aces on home ice in the pre-season, and the Aces fall to everyone else everywhere else. After every game, Kent dully tells his team that they’ll get ‘em next time, or whatever you tell a sweaty circle of twenty-something men who love winning like breathing but just can’t seem to get it done. They’re all good old-fashioned man’s men, father’s sons, and so impotence is like a death sentence to them, some sort of ultimate shame.

Their twelfth game, sixth of the season, is a shootout loss to the Canucks at home, and Kent wanted this one. He wanted to hold the meat of it between his teeth and bite down. Instead, he got haphazard passes in the O-zone, pissed off D-men left out to dry by their forwards, and a goalie so tired from blocking shots in regulation and overtime that the shootout was lost before it began. It’s hard to believe that four years ago, this is the team that hefted Lord Stanley’s cup.

Actually, it’s not hard to believe at all. They’re coasting off a win nearly half a decade ago, and it’s so fucking obvious that Kent thinks he might rip his hair out by the roots or someone else’s throat out with his teeth.

Something’s gotta give. Someone’s gotta give. So Kent says, “We’ll get ‘em next time, boys,” gets into his car, sits in the parking lot until everyone else has left, and calls his agent.

“I want a trade,” he says before she can even say hello.

“I figured,” Jenny replies. She’s forty-something, with tortoiseshell glasses and a no-nonsense bun threaded with grey, but what she lacks in height and weight, she makes up for in sheer gravitas. Kent’s not tall by any athletic metric, but he’s got at least seven or eight inches on her and even his knees quake whenever she walks into the room. Her voice lacks inflection of any kind, a soldier in Kate Spade and Carolina Herrera. “They won’t give you permission. You have five years left on your contract.”

She says it with so much authority that he doesn’t even question it. He already knows that she’s asked, because she knows him better than he knows himself. But hey, in all fairness, a lot of people claim to know Kent better than he knows himself.

“They’re rebuilding, aren’t they?” he asks, resigning himself to his fate. Jenny hums. She works and lives in New York, so he can hear the bustle of traffic through her phone speaker, the dulcet tones of his home city. The hot seat of his car suddenly feels foreign, fever-inducing. “Around me.”

“You are their best player and their captain. It’s your face on the wall.”

He looks up at the banner hanging from the arena’s crest. It’s a really good picture of him: his hair is tamed but still curly, he looks as young and cocksure as he is without seeming immature or childish, and the white C on his jersey is about ten feet tall. He looks reassuring, confident. They also touched up his dark undereyes digitally, since the makeup they plastered onto his face made unappealing creases. They captioned the damn thing GO ALL IN .

That, up there, is Kent Parson, the Art Ross-winning ageless young captain of the Aces. In his car with his agent on speakerphone, Kent is twenty-four and so exhausted that he thinks his bones might melt into the shape of the leather seats. He thinks about all the people he’s about to lose who will only resent him for being the reason they’re leaving. It’s not that they’re bad players. It’s that they’re bad for him, and so they’ll have to uproot their entire lives and families and careers for the sake of the notoriously single twenty-four-year-old without a personal life all because he's a little faster and a little more annoying.

“It’s gonna be brutal,” he says. Jenny hums again.

“If they do what they told me they would, it’s probably going to be the worst thing you’ve ever experienced.”

“Don’t say that,” Kent says quietly, “I’ve had a lot of bad experiences.”

“I know,” Jenny replies, her voice softening infinitesimally. “But for ten million a year for eight years? I think you can handle it. Get back to me in five years with a bigger number or a new location if you still feel like changing.”

“Sure. Let me know if I’m ever on the chopping block, okay?”

“Oh, you’ll know.”

He hangs up, and the car is suddenly very, very quiet. He cranks it into gear, and not even the sound of the engine rumbling can fill his head completely.

Identify the problems.

Alright. Here are Kent’s problems.

A month ago, his team started fucking losing, and he hates losing. It makes him play angry, which makes him better than ever. He’s probably playing some of the best hockey of his life, but no one can keep up with him when he’s like this, and so he has to make himself genial and palatable and it makes him worse, which only pisses him off more. It’s like he’s eating himself limb by limb, chewing off the ugliest parts that also happen to be the most useful ones.

He leaves an empty apartment, he comes back to an empty apartment, and in the interim, he has to be cocky and happy-go-lucky and play his part, when all he wants to do is play brutal, angry, pristine hockey. The kind of hockey he played with Jack.

He's done being the frat boy and the unflappable smug grin and the guy you love to hate. He wants to be more than a threat: he wants to be a promise.

Four months ago, Jack texted him and said: Got engaged. Figured you should know. Hope you’re well. To which Kent replied: thats great man rlly happy for u and then pitched his phone at the wall so hard that there was a puncture in the plaster and his cat hid under the loveseat (hah!) for three hours before he managed to coax her out with smoked salmon. He’s not exactly expecting an invitation.

A year and a half ago, Jack Zimmermann kissed his little blond boyfriend at center ice after winning the Stanley Cup, came out as Gay Hockey Jesus, and everyone was really cool with it, except for all of the people who weren’t. Nobody on the Aces was virulently homophobic, but they weren’t exactly saints, either. There were the snide remarks and jokes and questions aimed at Kent in the locker room and by the media and on Twitter vis a vis exploring Jack Zimmermann’s body. That was fun. He had so much fun with that. If he had to pick, his favourite part was throwing up after.

If he hadn’t wanted to come out before, the incident had taught him a valuable lesson: he didn’t owe the world anything. If Jack wanted to be the patron saint of healthy masculinity and the NHL’s social justice poster boy, that was his own self-imposed burden. Kent had no interest in sitting next to him, shoulder to shoulder on two stools saying something like ”I’m gay and he’s gay and You Can Play! Just don’t ask us about how we hooked up for most of juniors and he told me that he loved me but when we were eighteen, he almost killed himself, and I had to claw mushed-up pills out of his mouth before the ambulance came and then waited in a hospital waiting room for eighteen hours without sleep and then he didn’t speak to me ever again if he could help it. Love is love!”

You can’t exactly say that at the Pride parade, can you?

Two years ago, Kent Parson realized he needed to stop being in love with the person who had hurt him in more ways than he could ever imagine. He just didn’t know how. It was the best hockey of his life, and regardless of what Jack thinks and the media thinks and everyone else thinks, the best hockey of his life is all he has ever wanted.

Therein lies the problem.

---

Step Two: Excise the Rot

They have a three-day gap between games, which means two practices and an optional skate.

The first practice, they pull Shetty and Hairball off the ice halfway through a D-zone drill. Shetty isn’t a shock: he’s getting old and his knee isn’t doing so well anymore, but he’s been an Ace since there were Aces, and watching him actually leave with his head down is the final nail in the coffin of any rookie’s optimism. They’re rebuilding. It’s unavoidable now.

Hairball is a kick in the ass. He’d been putting up pretty good numbers for years now. Nothing impressive, but endlessly consistent and enough to earn himself an A. Kent looks around and he can see that the disappearance of that shaggy mullet down the tunnel has rocked most of the team to its core.

"Come on boys, let's keep going."

Kent checks his phone after practice despite forbidding the rest of the team from doing so, under the guise of texting his mom. Marcus Shetland, Harrison Ballantine, and a second-round pick go for two young second-line defenders from Seattle who’ve already proven they work well together. It’s a good trade: the Schooners need a veteran presence to settle their team of young guns, and Vegas needs to dump Shetty's contract and grab a better defensive core with some potential longevity. It’s gonna disrupt a few families and terrify some rookies that Kent will have to console, but it's a good trade.

He stops by Hairball’s apartment on his way to Shetty’s. Hairball’s sitting cross-legged on the floor next to an empty suitcase and a pile of unfolded laundry, staring blankly at his phone screen, when Kent lets himself in through the unlocked door.

“Where’s Lily?” He asks, because he’s sure as hell not going to ask a six-foot-three winger why he’s got wet eyes and a pile of laundry. Hairball coughs, sniffles, and then turns to him with a grim smile.

“Taking a walk. She and I…she’s pissed. Her family is here. We’re supposed to get married here in July. I really thought…I guess I didn’t think…shit, man, I thought I was hitting my stride here.”

“I know, dude.” Kent says quietly, lingering in the doorway. “I’m sorry.”

Hairball’s been putting up good numbers, but the truth is that he can’t pass for shit in the neutral zone. He’s big, he’s a battering ram with a wicked shot, but he’s a tank on a team already filled with some solid guys. They need more skill, more speed, and less size. He’ll do better in Seattle, but nobody wants to hear that when they think they’re safe.

He sits and helps Hairball fold his laundry in silence until Lily, Hairball’s fiance, comes back with enough Chinese takeout to feed a family of five, or a single hockey player and one other person. Her gaze hardens when she sees him sitting there, and he knows she blames him for this. He ducks his head from her gaze and mumbles an excuse to leave so that he can tell her she's right without actually telling her.

“I’ll miss you.” Hairball says as they wait for the elevator. He insisted on walking Kent down like Kent hasn’t spent countless weekends here playing Assassins Creed on his flatscreen.

“Yeah man,” Kent replies, after promising to text the Schooners captain and to help Lily pack up their apartment since Hairball’s expected at practice with the Schooners tomorrow afternoon. “I’ll miss you too. Keep in touch, alright?”

He feels hollow as he gets in his car and drives to Shetty’s house. If he thought Lily’s condemning eyes were bad, Shetty’s wife and kids are about to be a nightmare.

“Hi Kent,” Kendra says when she opens the door. Her eyes are shiny and swollen red, and she folds immediately when Kent opens his arms, hugging him tightly around the middle. He’s known her since he was a rookie staying in Shetty’s basement suite, and if he had known it was going to end like this, he would’ve been a much better tenant.

“I’m so sorry,” he says uselessly. “Is there anything I can do?”

“The kids will be so glad to see you,” Kendra sniffles as they part, “They’re gonna stay here to finish out the school term, but they’re already…well, you know.”

Shetty has three kids, twin boys named Caden and Jayden whom Kent still has trouble telling apart when they’re not colour-coded, and their little sister Maeve, who was born during Kent’s rookie season. She’s sitting on her father’s lap when Kent enters the living room, and books it over to him the second she hears his feet hit the floor.

“Kenny!”

He swings her up, around, and back down while Shetty watches with tears in his eyes. “Hey, Lucky. Can I talk to your dad for a sec?”

“I wanna hear!”

“Come on, Maeve,” Kendra says from the doorway, “Let’s get you to bed. It's way past bedtime.”

“Kent, will you come read me a story?”

He looks over at Shetty, who nods in listless agreement, busily trying to hoist himself upright without troubling his bad knee too much.

“Sure, sweetheart,” he says, pressing a little kiss to her forehead when she leans in for it. “I’ll be up soon if your dad and I are done talking.”

Maeve scampers away, her feet thundering up the wooden stairs with Kendra’s measured steps following primly after her. Kent waits until he hears a door shut and water running before he opens his mouth.

“I wish I coulda warned you.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Kent,” Shetty says, patting him on the shoulder, “S’not your fault.”

He’s supposed to be the captain here, but Shetty’s always been the one he comes to and so now he doesn’t know what to do. “Sure.”

“I’m serious.” Shetty says gravely, “I blame Swoops and Scraps just as much as you.”

He’s obviously kidding, but there’s truth in his little jab. Scraps is their starting goalie, and Jeff is Kent’s left-winger, the only one who can keep up with his mood swings as well as his speed. If anyone’s safe, it’s them three and Kent’s other winger, Genie.

“If it were up to me-”

“You’re a good kid, Parse,” Shetty says, sitting on the couch with a sigh, his daughter’s stuffed elephant gripped between his hands. “But don’t think I don’t see how much you want another Cup, and how much we’re pissing you off by keeping you from it. So don’t bullshit me about how if it were up to you, you’d keep me around. I have two or three years left in me at most. My best years are far behind me.”

“I would have wanted your name on the Cup again,” Kent says quietly, because the Schooners are doing better than the Aces, but not by much and definitely not by enough, “That’s what I wanted to say.”

“Shit, kid,” Shetty sighs, leaning back in his chair to look at the ceiling. He shuts his eyes like he’s dreaming about it. “Me too.”

Kent reads Maeve two chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, kisses her goodnight, helps Kendra start to look at houses in Seattle while Shetty packs his things into a single bag, and then drives him to the airport for his red-eye. They don’t talk as the streetlights flicker against the windshield, and when Kent hugs Shetty goodbye, it’s brief and melancholic, a pale reflection of four years ago when Kent passed him the Cup.

“I’ll be back for one last Thanksgiving,” Shetty promises.

“Tell Kendra to call me anytime.” Kent replies. “I’m not kidding.”

He gets back into his car, and instead of hitting his head against the steering wheel until he passes out, he immediately calls his sister. Beth picks up on the fourth ring, a miracle considering she’s in her freshman year of college and never has her ringer on.

“Shut up, it’s Kent!” He hears her shout over her shoulder instead of a typical greeting, and his hands loosen slightly on the steering wheel.

“Good to see you haven’t forgotten me yet, Elisabeth.”

“Okay, Kenneth, whatever you say,” a door shuts and the noisy artifact shrinks down to just her voice. It’s echoey, like she’s in a bathroom. “God, I’m so fucking wiped. I had my first midterm today, and I probably failed, so now I might do magic mushrooms. Don’t tell Mom.”

“Princeton, everything you dreamed and more?”

Her voice is scathing. “It’s New Jersey, Kent. It’s a microcosm of rich kids in Jersey. It’s a fucking nightmare.”

“Don’t do magic mushrooms, I don't want you to jump off a roof,” he says, and then, “Hey, so, are you busy next weekend? If I paid for a ticket-”

“No.”

He takes the exit off the highway, making sure he’s not speeding as he passes by a cop lurking on the shoulder before he answers. “No, what?”

Beth’s voice is flat. “No, I’m not going to fly to Vegas next weekend to comfort you about your losing streak or Jack Zimmermann’s engagement or the fact that your whole team is being traded this week, or whatever it is that you’re feeling particularly saturnine about as you drive home from wherever you’ve spent the last few hours moping.”

He’s silent for a moment, “Not even if I let you invite a friend?”

“I’m eighteen and you won’t buy me booze or let me use my fake-”

“-you got another fake?”

“-or smuggle me into a casino or take me to a stripclub, so there is nothing, literally nothing for me to do in Vegas that I can’t do in New York.”

“God, at this point, just say you like Mom better than me.”

“Well, she did pop me out of ye olde vaginal canal,” Beth sighs, “Jesus, Kent. Don’t you have friends?”

He does have friends. He goes on runs and plays video games with Swoops, he and Scraps argue about music whenever they carpool to practice. They go over to each others houses for barbecues and shit. That’s friendship. “Just because I don’t have weird girlie mind-reading cult shit going on between me and my friends like you do-”

“-that is sooooo sexist, my brother’s sexist-”

“-doesn’t mean that I don’t have friends.” Kent’s heaving for breath by the end of that, for reasons unknown to him since he has the lung capacity of a professional athlete. Beth is silent for a few moments before she asks the quintessential question.

“Is this about-”

“I’m over Jack,” he says, turning into his apartment’s parking lot and punching the car’s off button. The lights die. “I’m really happy for him and Bittle.”

The worst part is that it’s mostly true. Kent doesn’t love Jack anymore, at least not like that. Bittle is the kind of acerbically sweet that Kent could never have been, so fundamentally nice and generous and untainted that Kent can’t help but like him. But God, does he miss the fight and the fury and the flurried, heady emotions of victory. He wants to play electric hockey again, but that’s only half of it. He wants to play electric hockey again, and he wants to win, and he wants someone who can keep up with him while he does it, and for all of Jack’s faults and poking, jagged parts, he could keep up.

Kent braces his forehead on the top of the steering wheel, and inhales deeply. “If we do all of this and then we can’t win, what happens next?”

“Hey, I’m in the fucking bathroom, asshole!” Beth shouts at the same time, “What did you say, Kenny? Sorry, one of Elena’s loser FUCKING FRIENDS DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO KNOCK.”

“I said, do you want an off-campus apartment next year?” Kent lies.

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know. We might try and rent a student house.”

“Don’t rent a student shithole, please, I don’t want you to get mold in your Ivy-League brain. If you want a house instead, I can just get you a nice new one.”

“You’re fucking insane, but when the revolution comes, I'll make sure they don't eat you.”

“Just say “thank you, Kent.””

“Hey,” Beth says, her voice tense with something that isn’t gratitude for Kent’s magnanimous generosity, “Have you talked to Mr. Sokolov today?”

“Beth, he’s my liney and he’s only a few years older than me, at this point I’m begging you to just call him Evgeni.”

“You should call him.” She says again, and then there’s the ding of her sending him a screenshot. He’s about to ask her what can’t be said over the phone when he reads the screenshot she’s just pulled off of Twitter. “I’m sorry, Kent. I know he’s a friend of yours.”

That’s how he learns they’ve traded Carl and Genie to the Habs for a backup goalie and Augustin Berenger.

---

Step Three: Acquire Better Assets

Every draft year has its hero, some acne-ridden lanky kid with chubby cheeks and the same haircut as the last guy for all the dads at home to see their sons in. The kid goes first overall, and either becomes a household name in whatever city they land in, or they fade into obscurity, a question for trivia night that nobody can answer.

In the 2011 draft, it was Kent Vincent Parson, shoehorned in at the last minute to replace the shiny new Zimmermann model that everyone wanted. The 2011 draft was something of an anomaly: everyone was frothing at the mouth for the legacy, the young saviour of old hockey. Jack and Kent had stirred the pot enough on their own merit: they were talented, they came as a set, but everyone wanted to see the magic turn on itself in real-time, to watch the best friends become bitter rivals. Everyone loves to watch a car crash.

When Jack crashed and burnt, it blew the whole thing to a fever pitch. Did Kent poison his rival? Drive him off the brink of sanity? Did Jack Zimmermann have a secret cocaine/meth/ecstasy/alcohol/insert-substance-of-choice addiction? Did he try to kill himself? Did he want to die? So many questions that Kent didn’t answer, so many questions he still couldn’t answer.

All this to say, nobody really remembers what happened in 2010, and how much that affected the Jack-and-Kent-frenzy, except Kent.

In 2010, it wasn’t a tough call and nobody pretended otherwise: everybody knew that Augustin Berenger would be selected first overall by the Houston Aeros, who were congratulating themselves on stealing such a momentous draft pick from Edmonton. No matter what team was up first, it was always going to be Augustin, far and away the best player in his draft by a wider margin than the Grand Canyon.

Kent remembers watching it on the TV with Jack: ”With the first overall pick of the 2010 draft, the Houston Aeros select, from the QJMHL’s Rouyn-Noranda Huskies, number seven, Augustin Berenger.”

“What a surprise,” Jack said, throwing a piece of popcorn at the screen as Augustin swaggered onstage to receive a jersey, number seven already reserved just for him. “Putain de fucking asshole. Remember when he nearly crashed Joker in net last year? God, I can’t wait to have a season where I don’t have to play him.”

“You just don’t like him because he’s better than you at all the things you’re good at.” Kent had said, mostly as a joke, and Jack turned those ice-blue eyes on him, cold as a Canadian winter. There was nothing more to be said about Augustin Berenger for the rest of the night.

After all, it was only mostly a joke. Kent hated playing Augustin too, but that was because he hated losing.

Augustin’s face was already plastered on the Houston Aeros’ arena two weeks later when Kent and Jack went down to Texas for a development camp: solid, angular nose, serious dark eyes topped with darker eyebrows, with his permanent semi-frown and chin lifted in quiet contempt. If Jack was the dignified prince of old hockey, and Kent was the scrappy all-American comeback kid, Augustin was some sort of hero from epic myth, the kind of person who was carved throwing a javelin that Kent used to stare up at when his mom took him the Met as a kid. No soul. No emotion. Just muscle and stone and skill.

Augustin was a franchise player, there was no doubt about it. He was endlessly fast and graceful as a figure skater despite being six-foot-one. He adapted with chameleon precision, he played better than any other person on any ice he shared. He made the Aeros exciting, he made even Kent want to watch what should've been a boring, bumbling expansion team fumble through another mediocre season. His first few months in the show was the nightly highlight reel.

And then Something happened. Suddenly, the magic of Augustin Berenger was gone. Plays stopped in their tracks, passes didn’t connect. It was as if there were three teams on the ice: the Aeros, their opponents, and Augustin. He still scored plenty because he was just that good, but rumours abounded: his team hated him, he hated his team, he wheeled a teammate's girlfriend or sister or mom, typical journo shit that always has a kernel of truth. He lost the Calder, the Aeros missed the playoffs, and after a fifty-three-point inaugural season, Augustin was labeled a liability, busted down to the AHL for the first half of the next season and called back up only when it became clear that he was too good for anything else.

No one says it out loud, but Kent knows that watching Augustin’s career fall apart in real time, cruelly dissected by pundits and talking heads that had heralded him as the second coming of Gretzky only six months prior, didn’t exactly do Jack’s mental health any favours. Whether or not it was the straw that broke the camel’s back is a question even Jack probably couldn’t answer.

After the year that Kent got the Calder, the Aeros traded Augustin to the Rangers, who let him get signed by the Hurricanes, who handed him off to the Habs, who had now thrown him carelessly to Vegas like a flop card.

The self-confidence which had once been worthy of idolatry was now a symbol of arrogance. The coldness which had been dismissed as focus, now considered contempt. The world saw a callous French-Canadian disappointment, everything Jack feared he would be perceived as tied up neatly in a lithe, dark-haired package.

Everyone saw someone who was too stubborn to change, too angry to submit himself to criticism and growth. That was what Kent saw, too. That’s the part that worries him most. That, and the fact that Augustin, despite all his faults, is still one of the best hockey players that Kent has ever seen by every metric that exists. If the Aces could use him to his fullest potential, they could make a Cup run the same year they entered a rebuild.

He can't blame Augustin for Jack's collapse. They were all kids, not even old enough to drink, with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Their talent and environment bred arrogance like rabbits. Jack is healthy and happy now, and they are on careful speaking terms. It is absolutely and undoubtedly illogical for Kent Parson to still blame Augustin Berenger for being the catalyst of everything wrong in his life.

But if he can’t blame someone else, he has to blame himself. So he chooses to blame Augustin anyway.

---

Step Four: Set a New Foundation.

Kent only has one guest bedroom, since it's usually only his mom or sister who come to stay, and if they both happen to come over at the same time, he sleeps on the couch.

Since this is the case, the two new D-men, Henrik Ahlgren and Jakob Frisk, decide to shack up together in a monthly rental in one of the buildings the Aces recommend to their new players. Kent can’t pick them up from the airport since his sleek car can only fit two or three bags before its chassis starts to get pissy, so instead he visits them early that morning and offers to give them a ride to the optional skate. They decline, although they accept Swoops’ invitation, relayed through Kent, for dinner tomorrow night for the new players and leadership core.

“How’re they?” Scraps asks after the poorly attended optional, when Kent’s crashed out on his couch scrolling through pictures of his cat to post on her Instagram account.

“They’re good kids,” Kent says, even though Frisky is older than him by two years and Allie was drafted the same year as him, early in the second round (he Googled it to make sure, so that he doesn’t come off as the biggest douchebag this side of the Mississippi to people he actually has to work with). “Ahlgren’s the bounciest motherfucker I’ve ever seen in my life. Dude didn’t stop smiling once the whole time I was there.”

“Have you met the new backup goalie yet? Linsky?”

“Naw,” Kent scratches his chin as he hits post on a picture of Kit mid-yawn. “Swoops is giving him the grand tour. But I checked out some highlights. He’s good enough, and he’s got potential.”

“And what about the elephant in the room?”

Kent puts his phone down. “We are going to welcome Augustin just as we would anyone else. Whatever rumours about his conduct in the locker room are just rumours, and we’re looking forward to-”

“Hey man, this is my living room, not a presser,” Scraps jabs, throwing himself onto the couch with a sigh and passing Kent a protein shake. “You played him the Q, right?”

“Right,” Scraps motions for him to continue, “He’s…talented.”

“That coming from you means you think he’s, like, the reincarnation of Maurice Richard.” Scraps throws a pillow at his head, “I was looking at his stats from last season. Fifty-eight points, but only twelve assists? That’s…”

“Absurd.” Kent agrees. To get that many goals and so few assists is almost mathematically impossible, and he’s not exactly great at math to begin with, but he knows that stats like that don't happen naturally.

“Come on, man. Is there actually something wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” Kent says honestly, “But I guess we’ll find out.”

He finds out earlier than most people, because the GM calls him early the next morning to ask him a) if he’s willing to pick Berenger up from the airport and b) if Berenger can stay in his guest room until he gets set up.

Except he’s not really asking, and Kent’s saying yes before he’s fully awake, so there’s a disconnect between free will and predestination going on here that ends with Kent in his car steering into the International Arrivals parking lot at McCarran and hoping his trunk is big enough to fit both Augustin’s ego and his bags.

There’s an extra black coffee in the passenger seat cupholder that he leaves where it is, because he doesn’t want to come off as desperate.

Augustin is easy to spot in the crowd coming out of customs: he’s wearing a crisp black suit despite coming off a six-hour morning flight, his dark hair coiffed and curled over itself in gelled waves, and he looks as if he’s the most bored that he’s ever been in his life. Hockey players have a reputation for being boring, and a lot of the time they are, but there’s a difference between being carefully blank and outright disdainful. Augustin is a fan-favourite because he's never been boring in his life.

In contrast, Kent’s wearing a ragged Aces’ hoodie, pink flamingo shorts, and a backwards baseball cap, and he’s trying his very best to look appropriately excited without grimacing like a feral dog who pisses on carpets.

Everyone in the baggage claim is looking at Augustin, who in turn is looking nowhere. Kent gets it, because Augustin’s slim and tall and has a very Victorian face for a hockey player, the kind with high cheekbones that’s regal and looks as if it belongs to someone who would be flabbergasted by a lightbulb turning on. He seems like he’s someone much more important than he is. He has the same gravitas as Jack. Kent’s starting to wonder if it’s a Quebecois thing.

“Berenger,” he says, the proper French way because he’s not an asshole, and Augustin looks up from his phone. Kent doesn’t wave, and neither does Augustin, so they both stand there staring at each other from across the room until Kent realizes that they both expect the other to come to them first.

Yeah, he can tell he’s about to be really jazzed about this whole thing.

“Kent Parson,” Augustin says, and he has traces of that stubborn accent underneath his voice, presumably stronger from his year and a half in Montreal. “Is this the welcome wagon? I sort of expected a stripper. Or some balloons.”

“Welcome to Vegas,” Kent says with restrained diplomacy worthy of Aces captaincy, and they begrudgingly meet halfway, next to the luggage carousel. He tries to inject his trademark humour into the mix, that sort of shit-eating smile he’s famous for, “If you want a stripper, just let PR know so they can kill you before you find one. How many bags do you have? I can give you a hand.”

Augustin angles his eyes down to his carry-on. “No need, I pack light. I just need my gear and sticks.”

“Right.” Kent says awkwardly. That, at least, explains the suit. Augustin seems uninterested in talking anymore, eyes lazily tracking the bags swinging by one by one. Kent stuffs his hands in his pockets and pulls out his phone

There’s a text from Swoops: How is he, in five words or less?

Kent isn’t a scholarly guy: he likes most of the books that his sister recommends to him, but she’s a literature major, so they usually go over his head. The one thing he does often gain, though, is an extensive vocabulary. And yet, with words like austere, reserved, aloof, and solemn all available to him, the descriptor he chooses to send Jeff is stick up his ass

“That’s only four words,” Augustin says, and when Kent looks up, he realizes that Augustin has been waiting for him with his hockey bag slung over his shoulder and a set of sticks under his arm. Not only that, he’s staring at Kent’s phone screen without any sense of shame, and yeah, Kent’s starting to intimately understand why nobody likes this guy much.

“Are we going to have a problem?” He blurts out bluntly. Augustin’s face barely twitches.

“I’ve never had a problem in my life,” he replies. “Which way is your car?”

When Augustin folds himself into Kent’s passenger seat, he takes the cup of coffee Kent brought him without asking if it was his, and starts drinking it. “Hey, not bad.”

“What if that was mine?” Kent asks as they pull out of the parking lot. He’s not even trying anymore: Augustin’s snooping has already nullified any sort of politeness that might have been even a little convincing, and besides, Kent doesn’t fucking like him right now. Augustin narrows his eyes at Kent’s non-fat iced cappuccino with extra coconut whip.

“I was just hoping that the ludicrous one was yours.”

“Is this about how I boarded you way back in the Q that one time?” Kent asks, trying to remember what he might have done to piss Augustin off. There’s been more than a few incidents over the years, but he can’t really keep them straight in his head, and that seems like the most egregious occurrence. “Because I was like fifteen, you need to get over it.”

“That was you?” Augustin replies, cheekbone propped on his hand as he stares out the window like he’s in a Hugo Boss advert. “I thought it was a rabid chihuahua.”

Yeah, Kent can tell that this is going to go great.

Step Five: Start Praying.

Chapter 2

Summary:

In which Augustin Berenger has a spreadsheet, a manipulative streak, and Kent Parson runs his mouth

Augustin has begun to develop what he likes to call his “about-to-be-traded-sixth-sense.” The trademark is pending.

He calls his agent before the Habs GM can even call him, “Is it Vegas, Nashville, or Florida? You should know that I’m listing heinous places to live that just happen to coincide with mediocre NHL teams. Ottawa?”

“You’re my least favourite client,” Jerry says, and he probably means it. “It’s Vegas, they need-”

“A skilled playmaking forward to go with Parson’s weird new whatever-it-is that he’s doing.” Augustin finishes. He knows. He has a spreadsheet on potential trades, and she’s as beautiful as she is accurate. “Tell Bergevin he doesn’t need to bother calling me. Just have him send me the flight information. I’m already packed.”

“Hey, Berenger?” Jerry always pronounces his name like that: bear-in-jur. Which is why Augustin calls him Jerry and not his real name, which is Steve.

“Yes, Jerry?”

“You’re a weird fucking kid and if you didn’t make as much money as you did, I’d drop you like a sack of potatoes.”

“It’s why I pay you the big bucks, Jerry!” Augustin says, and then hangs up before Jerry can. Then he throws his phone into the couch cushions and screams so loud that his downstairs neighbour hits his floor with the end of a broom or something until he shuts up.

He knew playing for the Habs wasn’t going to last: it was a pipe dream at best, and a cruel twist of irony at worst, to play for his childhood team knowing they’d dump him for cap space the second they could get a good deal for him. To say he had tried to get along with them would be an exaggeration, but he had put in more effort than the Aeros had deserved or the Rangers and Canes had inspired. Fifty-seven points last season isn’t bad when everyone’s a little afraid to pass to you and nobody can keep up.

Vegas. God. Augustin can’t stand heat. The Aces, despite their dearth of talent, play dirty, gritty, clumsy hockey. He’s pretty sure he won’t be able to stand that insufferable blond runt Kent Parson either. He remembers the kid from the Q, because the pipsqueak not only took a run at him in their first game, but he was Parson of what would quickly become Parson-Zimmermann fame, the saints of Rimouski.

Jack Zimmermann, who Augustin always privately thought was way too uptight and neurotic to be the hockey player he had the potential to be, has long since grown up. He had taken his time, he had molded his passion, and he’d also kissed a short blond after he won the Stanley Cup in front of the most homophobic fanbase in sports, so he had a pair on him too. He’s a self-righteous and annoying guy with a famous dad, but a guy Augustin very begrudgingly respects. He plays a good, solid, traditional game.

Kent Parson is a whole other ball game. He is a jackass, a shit-eating frat boy whose raw talent and incredible discipline Augustin finds both incredibly infuriating and insatiably gratifying. Kent Parson got the reception Augustin wanted, the reputation he craved, the admiration of the kind of skill and speed that Augustin had in spades. Calder, Art Ross, Conn Smythe. Parson innovated the game. He practically wrote the Aces playbook, just like Augustin wrote the Aeros’, but only one of them is reaping the rewards.

Playing against Kent Parson is a treat in itself, because no one can shut down one of Augustin’s plays like Kent can. Playing with Kent Parson can only be both worse and better in equal amounts. All Augustin wants is someone who can keep up with him. Kent Parson is his best shot at a Cup and catharsis, so if he has to deal with the little king of the hill lording over him, he’ll deal. Not nicely, but he'll deal.

He finishes his coffee as Kent pulls into the underground parking lot of T-Mobile Arena, which is built to look like a castle for some reason, and tucks the empty cup into the side pocket of his hockey bag as he takes it out of the trunk. Parson is already far ahead of him by the time he gets his sticks out, bustling towards the entrance and leaving Augustin to trail doggedly after him for his first practice on new ice in a year and a half.

He could have been nice, if he wanted to. Parson’s a year younger than him, and this is the first time his hockey team has ever been truly bad, but Augustin’s not here to be a shoulder for Parson to cry on. He’s here to win, but it’s more than that. He’s here to be Jack Zimmermann.

He doesn’t even know if Parson’s aware of what his coaches and managers are cooking up. Tall, dark-haired French-Canadians are a dime a dozen in their line of work, but Augustin’s got that particular blend of skilled and calculated, and the whole thing smacks of chasing down that long-lost Parson-Zimmermann magic. The management thinks they want Parson to have a new best friend, but Augustin knows that the friendship isn’t what made the magic happen. They’re not kids anymore; friendship is not magic, and Augustin has watched enough Rimouski games to know that the skill, drive, and thirst for victory came from intense, bitter rivalry.

Trust will come later. Right now, he has to piss Parson off, and he’s doing a fantastic job if he does say so himself.

A member of the head office meets him outside the dressing room with a set of practice jerseys, protocols, and things for him to sign that he tells her to fax to Jerry because he wasn’t born yesterday. The Aces wear sharp black and silver, but their practice jerseys are an inexplicable shade of mustard yellow that hurts his eyes and delicate design sensibilities.

“Do I have to wear this?” He asks, not because he’s a diva, but because it says ‘7’ on the back. He hasn’t worn 7 since he was drafted, and he doesn’t want to start again now. The woman gives him a dry look.

“If you ask me for 69, I’ll make your life miserable.” She says, and walks away without another word. Americans are so fucking weird.

Someone brave wolf-whistles at him when he walks in with his suit on. The rest of the team is on the edge of their seats. He knows he has a reputation, but this is ridiculous: there’s a bunch of kids wide and tall enough to use his forearm as a toothpick staring at him like he’s about to grow a second head.

“Hey,” he says, waving with his free hand. “What’s up with the yellow jerseys?”

Parson claps him on the back too hard to be nice, his stupid snapback now sitting on top of his stall and his hair all stuck up in blond licks. “You all probably know Augustin Berenger already. Olympic gold medalist, three-time All-Star. Habs gave him up kicking and screaming, I’ll tell you that much.”

He’s still bitter about losing Evgeni Sokolov. Augustin salts the open wound by smiling in a way that’s only mildly threatening as opposed to moderately so, and saying, “I’m happy to be here. I hope we can get along, but you know, if we can’t, you’ll all have really fun stuff to say to Sportsnet in a couple of months. Or days, depending on how tomorrow’s game goes.”

Jeffrey Troy, who Augustin knows pretty well from playing with him on Team Canada in 2014, laughs at that, doubles over and everything. Augustin feels his grin widen when Parson’s face falls into a brief scowl before it smooths over with alarming speed.

He takes a little longer to suit up than the others since he has to tuck his suit and dress shirt carefully into a garment bag. By the time he’s lacing up his skates, the only three people left in the room are Parson, all suited up, and the two goalies: Vittorio Scarpello, who insists on being called Scraps, and the new kid, Adam Linsky, who was pulled up from the farm team and replaced down there by the Habs prospect goalie they’d gotten in Augustin’s trade.

“It’ll be fine, kid,” Scarpello says, pulling his mask over his face as he stands. “C’mon.”

“You’ll do great,” Parson tells the kid as they walk by, and he sounds like he really means it. “Scraps will take care of you.”

“Thanks, Parse,” Linsky says, tapping Parson on the top of the helmet as he passes. Scraps gives his captain a big, exaggerated thumbs up that he must think Augustin can’t see, and whispers:

“If you’re not out in three, I’m going to assume he killed you.”

“He’s small, it would only take me one or two,” Augustin says as he finishes tying his skates. Scraps turns so red under his mask that his head might have become a tomato, and waddles out without another word, only the wave of a glove hand over his shoulder as he disappears around the corner.

“Could you hurry the fuck up?” Parson asks the second the goalies are out of earshot. Augustin takes his sweet time strapping on his chestpads and doing up his neckguard. He’s the only one on the team who wears one, he noticed, but then again, it was their God-given right to get a skate to the bare jugular.

“Dropped the nice act really quick,” he retorts, shrugging on the too-big piss-jersey. “Relax, you have everyone running out there early to please you, oh captain my captain. We’re not gonna be late. I’ve never been this early to practice in my life.”

It’s a lie, he’s always this early to practice, but Parson doesn’t know that, and wouldn’t believe it if he did. You see, Augustin has that pesky reputation for being somewhat of a degenerate and all. It’s nice in some cases, and flat-out annoying in others. Angelique is going to love hearing this when he calls her tonight.

“Don’t quote Walt Whitman to me.” Parson snaps, arms crossed over his own piss-jersey.

“I was quoting Robin Williams, you fucking nerd. You can just go without me.”

“Sure,” Parson says dryly as Augustin straps on his helmet and makes his way towards the door, following him doggedly down the hallway and onto the rinkside, “I’ll just leave you unattended so you can chew all the furniture and shit on the carpet.”

For that one, Augustin chooses not to tell him that his skate guards are still on until he’s eaten shit right in front of the media girl’s camera.

“Highlight reel,” he says as he skates by Kent’s prone form gracefully, and yeah, now they’re really in it. He can hear Kent cursing his bloodline as he yanks the skateguards off his blades, and grins.

Practice is better than he expected out of the poor showing of the Aces’ losing streak. They still play dirty, gritty hockey, but the new defensemen have a good sense of strategy and a freakish, somewhat homoerotic drift-compatibility that only good D-partners have.

“Ever seen Pacific Rim?” He asks them during a water break. “You should. Come over sometime, I’ll show you the world’s weirdest giant robot movie since Iron Giant.”

“Don’t you live with Parse right now?” Frisk asks, squirting water down his back, “Would he mind?”

Kent’s over by the defensemen’s coach, leaned over a whiteboard with Troy, his only remaining alternate captain. The loss of Ballantine and Shetland is palpable in the aimless drifting of the rest of the team. Augustin slams his stick against the ice once, and everyone gets it together at the echoing sound, floating over to their captain.

“Nah, he’s cool with it,” Augustin replies, pushing off the boards. “When we get back from the roadie next week, we’ll do it.”

“Sick,” Allie says happily, bouncing on the toes of his skates.

They drill through a lot of basics: dump and chase, breakouts, two on threes and penalty kills. Augustin gets paired with a flurry of centers and wingers, none of whom just get it. They’re fine, everything’s working well enough, but their sticks drag and their passes stick on the ice and it all goes wrong too often. They’re too set in their ways.

Meanwhile, Parson and Troy are struggling with their new linemate, pulled up from the second line. Well, Parson is struggling. Troy and Makela work great together, but they’re on a different wavelength from their star center, and so nothing is clicking as it should.

It’s also visibly pissing Parson off.

“Sir,” Augustin says to Coach Wilson, a no-nonsense man in a black and silver tracksuit which proves the yellow is some kind of unethical social experiment. “I think you need to bump Swoops and Mack and put me on the left with Smitty on the right.”

Wilson looks at him like he’s got balls the size of Mars’ two moons, but Augustin’s worked with men who are much more stupid and much less reasonable throughout his career. He just nods, like yeah, do you think I’m here to fuck around?

“You know, the Aeros coach is a friend of mine,” Wilson says, spitting onto the ice as he takes out his whiteboard, “I’ve heard a lotta stuff about you, Berenger.” Bear-in-jur.

Augustin’s biggest flaw has always been that even when his foot is in there, his mouth still moves just as well. “Have you ever heard how to pronounce my name? S’okay. Ol’ Roger Gerhard never knew how to pronounce it either.”

Wilson looks at him for a few seconds, and Augustin thinks he’s blown his shot. He may have the quixotic bravado of Han Solo, but he’s pretty sure that one more trade and Jerry will send hitmen to kill him and collect his life insurance policy. And according to his spreadsheet, if he’s traded he’ll go to either Winnipeg or Arizona: between hot dry wasteland and cold wet wasteland, he’d rather stay in the place where the mafia launders its money.

But Wilson nods once, sharply. He blows his whistle just as sharply: “Troy, you’re swapping with Berenger.” Behr-ron-zhey . “Smitty, go with him and Parson.”

Augustin smiles, but Wilson glares at him until he skates away. “Wipe that fucking smile off your face.”

Smitty’s confused about why he’s suddenly on the first line, but he’s not one to complain. He’s a third-line rookie who clawed his way up from the farm team, but he’s fast on his feet, tough in corners and most importantly, he’s a blank canvas, a conduit through which Augustin can feed passes and plays to Parson and vice versa.

“Hey, is it true that you wheeled the Aeros owner’s wife and that’s why they traded you?”

He’s also got that endearing kiddish inability to shut the fuck up.

“His sister.” Augustin says, loud enough that the obvious eavesdroppers can hear him clearly.

“What?”

“The rumour is that I fucked his sister, not his wife.”

Smitty reels, like he’s never heard the word fuck before in his life, “Did you actually?”

“No.” Augustin says, because he finds women about as appealing to sleep with as he finds wilderness camping: he could probably do it once or twice, but not by choice and it wouldn’t be particularly enjoyable. “Go set up.”

It’s a simple drill, five on five: break out of the defensive zone, power through the neutral zone, and then try to score. It’s one degree removed from a scrimmage and two from a game. The first time they go, Parson tries a textbook play that gets caught up in the defenders’ skates.

“You’re supposed to find open ice,” he tells Augustin as the next line sets up to go.

“It’s not my job to make your life easier,” Augustin replies, knowing full well that if Kent hadn’t been stuck in the rut of the play, he would have passed far earlier. Parson grits his teeth audibly.

The second time, Smitty makes a perfect pass to Augustin, who dishes it to Parson only to find him standing stock still in front of the net. The puck goes in, but only because they’re all in there digging for it and Linsky can’t get a handle on the bouncing piece of rubber.

“Ugly fucking goal.” Augustin says.

“A goal’s a goal.” Kent growls back. “Go line up.”

While they’re waiting for the next round, Troy skates by and helpfully says, “Parse wants to bite your head off.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, so you still don’t have a self-preservation instinct.” Troy nods, “Nice. Love that.”

The third time, Parson does a fantastic deke around Frisk’s skates only to get caught up by a poke check from Linsky. He’d wanted to pass to Augustin as he’d memorized from the seven or eight plays he has stuck in his head for that specific scenario, when he should have just shot. Augustin tells him all that, not in so many words.

“Would you fucking take a shot?”

“I was trying to fucking drop-pass to you! You were in the middle of butt-fucking nowhere! Smitty, you’re a beauty, you're doing great.”

“Thanks, cap!”

The fourth time, Augustin just decides to take matters into his own hands, receives the beautiful pass from Smitty himself, and dipsy-doodles his way through the defenders, ignoring Parson’s desired play in order to sink the shot himself. It hits the back of the net with a dissatisfying swish just before Kent’s on his ass like a tick.

“What the fuck is your problem? I was so open they should have nailed a fucking neon sign to my chest.”

“Open? You were fucking swarmed by defenders, and you weren’t saying fucking anything. I thought you were constipated from all your fucking faces.”

“I couldn’t fucking let Frisk know where I fucking was, asshole. Have you ever played hockey in your fucking life?”

“Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know what you fucking want?”

“Maybe if you fucking watched what I was doing, you’d know what I want.” Kent snarls, shoving Augustin in the chest with surprising force. The external rumours are going to start with that. He can hear the journos in the stands writing about it from here, but right now he doesn’t care. He can see glory glowing golden in the fissures of Kent’s facade.

“I’ll give you what you want if you ask me nicely.”

“Kinky,” someone, probably Troy, mutters, but Parson doesn’t hear it.

“Fucking be a team player, or I’ll put you on your ass.” He says, not an ounce of joking tone in his flat, deadly voice.

Augustin resists the urge to say, promise? “Sure thing, short stack.”

“Cut the shit!” Wilson says, but he doesn’t end the drill because he’s a smart enough guy to know what Augustin is up to. Augustin can see it when they line up again, Kent threatening to boil over. They can all see it.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Troy says as he passes by.

It goes like this: Ahlgren dumps it in, the other D-men dish it up, and they’re all off like rockets down the ice, five on five, except that’s not even fair to say, because Augustin feels the tension and vigour slide into place with a click like a sixth player. Suddenly there are beautiful passes, flawless plays, and the best part is that none of it is from a playbook or game tape. It’s pure instinct, pristine skill, raw crackling talent.

Augustin gets a puck from Smitty in the corner, finds Kent in front of the net, threads a saucer pass through three sticks, and Kent slams the puck home without even looking at Augustin. His stick is already moving before the puck is where it needs to be, a perfect angle with a perfect trajectory.

Augustin feels the sound of it hitting the back of the net through his whole body. That’s it. That’s what we’ve all been looking for.

“Holy shit,” he hears someone say. Smitty lets out a whoop, throwing his hands in the air as Augustin loops around to look at Parson. Kent is glaring at him as they both heave for breath, circling each other lazily with leftover momentum, but they both know what just happened.

Augustin knows that Kent was expecting a talented problem, someone who either had no drive or no chemistry. He just can't tell if Parson is more pissed off about clocking Augustin wrong, or if it's that Augustin is forcing him to play the best hockey of his life.

“Go again,” Wilson says grimly from the blue line.

They go again, and they do it again, and again, and again, and it is pissing Kent off more that Augustin’s gambit is working, which just makes it more beautiful. They swap out D-pairings, put Scraps in the net just in case Linsky suddenly decided to be incompetent, but even he can’t stop a single shot. The goals aren’t ugly either: they’re always stunning to look at. Mesmerizing.

There’s a no-look one-timer somewhere in there. Augustin just knows in his gut that the puck is going to be there when his stick hits the ice and it is. It goes in, and Kent doesn’t even notice the gravity of the play as they line up to go again. It’s buried under deflections and pivots and goals.

Augustin can feel his muscles burning. For the first time in a long while, he’s going to wake up sore tomorrow.

Practice officially ended ten minutes ago, and the team is slowly trickling away in twos and threes. It’s only when Smitty finally falters in his efforts that Kent seems to notice they’ve been doing the same drill for twenty minutes, and that he’s holding his team hostage.

“Go change,” Wilson says to the group once his captain has noticed reality. “Good showing today.”

“We’ll get your endurance up,” Augustin tells Smitty as the rookie goes to get his water bottle, accepting a spray of it into his own parched throat. “Great job feeding those passes from the corner.”

“You’re skinny and he’s short,” Smitty shrugs, his chest heaving with residual effort. “Someone’s gotta get their hands dirty.”

“See you tomorrow for the game.” Augustin replies, “It’s just the Ducks. Shoot us some waterfowl, eh?”

“Eh?” Smitty parrots back with a grin and a wave, “See you around, liney.”

Augustin stays out on the ice as Kent works on face-offs with Troy, mostly watching and sometimes offering unhelpful comments just to remind Parson that he’s still there. Parson’s teeth are set in a permanent grimace. Eventually, Troy calls it before Kent can snap and bowl Augustin over in front of TSN and the sports reporter for the Las Vegas Sun.

“I gotta go pick up my place before you all come over,” he says, taking Parson by the scruff of the neck under the guise of patting him on the back, and dragging him off the ice so the Zamboni guy can finally do his job, “You got any drink preferences, Gus? I have beer and uh…probably some wine in my fridge.”

“I still don’t drink,” Augustin says as they step off the ice, the inertia of hitting solid ground causing him to stumble slightly. “I didn’t know I was coming over. I would’ve brought better clothes.”

“Kent didn’t tell you?”

“Must’ve slipped my mind,” Parson grunts, swatting Troy’s hand off of his neck, “Sorry.”

“Kent’s place is too small to host more than three or four people at once,” Troy explains, shooting his captain a weird, unreadable look. “But I guess you’ll see that for yourself soon. I’m just having over a couple of the veteran core and the new guys. You, Linsky, Allie and Frisk, et. cetera. It’ll be casual. I’m making lasagna. Kent will probably wear a snapback.”

“Yeah, probably,” Parson says antagonistically, throwing his gloves into his bag. Troy looks over at Augustin, mouths look what you’ve done, and changes as quickly as he can. He’s out the door in seven minutes.

Parson doesn’t talk to or look at him as they get dressed and walk down to the parking lot. They get into the car, and Augustin waits until the door is closed to say, “Oh my God, can you stop being such a big fucking baby?”

“You’ve been here for four hours,” Parson fumes at him, throwing his car into gear. It’s a ridiculous fucking car, sleek and dark and with an absolutely useless amount of trunk space, and it roars out of the parking lot and onto the desert streets with the thunder of a storm. “Four hours, and you’ve already thrown everything to shit, and I know you remember that I was the one that boarded you in the Q.”

”Crisse de tabarnak,” Augustin groans, his head hitting the car’s headrest. “Yeah, whatever, I remember that it was you. You got me! I lied.”

“Don’t fucking say that shit in my car.”

“If you tell me to speak English because this is America, I’ll throw you right through the windshield, I’m not kidding.”

Parson jerks them to a halt at a red light, turns to him, and says, “First of all, fuck you. Second of all, I’m finding you a hotel room.”

“You make me sound like an escort, but if you’re paying, I won’t complain,” Augustin shrugs, “I love some turndown service.”

“You make five and a half million dollars a year, you can’t pay for your own fucking hotel room?”

“I’m not supposed to. I’m staying in your guest room, so it’s not in the budget this year, I’m afraid.” He yawns. His thighs are already starting to hurt, and he got up at four in the morning for a flight. Now that the adrenaline is pumping itself out of his system, all he wants is the longest nap in the world. “Can I fight with you after I crash for a few hours?”

“Do not fall asleep in my car,” Parson grumbles, and hits the gas so hard that the engine roars to compensate for whatever it is that Parson feels that he lacks. “It’s fine, I only have to deal with you for one season.”

“Parson, if we play as well tomorrow as we did today, you’re going to be stuck with me for the rest of your career.”

Parson’s knuckles are white, but that’s all part of Augustin’s gambit. He knows that Kent would do a lot of things to get rid of him, but the one thing he would never do is jeopardize his team’s chance of winning. As long as the rest of the Aces can abide his presence, Parson is stuck with him, and they’re all going to play some excellent hockey about it.

Frankly, Augustin thinks, it’s about time something worked out for him. He’s not one to claim he deserves anything, but it’s been a while since someone else was in the hot seat and he could really use a break right about now. His entire NHL career has been spent in the hot seat.

Parson’s apartment is guarded by a doorman, and part of him thinks that Parson might cry wolf and get him arrested just out of sheer spite. Instead, he just rolls up to the front desk, jerks his thumb over his shoulder at Augustin and says: “Augustin Berenger. D’you mind adding him to the list?”

“Not at all,” the doorman says. He has an Aces lapel pin on, and when Augustin passes by, he holds out a white baseball cap already covered in signatures from various Aces of seasons past and present, like its own little visitor’s log. There’s more signature than open fabric.

“For my kid,” he says. Augustin takes the proffered cap and permanent marker, and scrawls his signature next to Kent’s. The doorman smiles at him. “It’s good to have you here in Vegas, Berenger.”

He says Augustin’s last name wrong, but so earnestly that Augustin finds he doesn’t care. “It’s good to be here. What’s your name?”

It’s not even mostly a lie, that he’s happy to be here, which he doesn’t see coming. He shoots Mike the doorman a thumbs up as he joins Parson at the elevator. The ride up to the penthouse floor is silent, the air thick with Kent’s leftover pissbaby temper tantrum from the car. It's just like being back in Juniors, where Augustin would skate by Parson in the penalty box and feel the sulking through layers of plexiglass.

“You hate that Mike likes me, don’t you?” Augustin asks smugly. Parson glares harder at the elevator door.

“His kid has my jersey,” he retorts as the elevator door opens, like it’s a trump card. Augustin makes a mental note to buy a jersey with his name for Mike’s kid the second they get released.

The moment the apartment door opens, there’s a thing crawling up Augustin’s leg. He lets out a shriek of surprise, trying to shake it off before realizing it’s a tiny grey kitten with white stripes, the social media sensation that is Kent’s ridiculously named cat.

“Whoops,” Parson says as Kit Purrson claws her way up Augustin’s dress shirt, shedding her cat hair all over it and poking little holes with her claws. “Forgot to warn you that she climbs. I hope you’re not allergic.”

Augustin cradles the beast and sets her gently down on the floor, where she starts gnawing at one of his shoelaces. “Nope. Sorry.”

Parson tosses his snapback onto the dining table and combs his fingers through his messy hair to release it from its scalp, “Come on, your room is this way.”

Augustin gets what Swoops means about Parson’s place being too small to host many people. It’s got high ceilings and massive windows, but it’s pretty cozy for a guy who makes ten million a year. The appliances in the small kitchen are all new and shiny, and a massive couch takes up half the living room. The white walls are covered in random pieces of framed art, an eclectic medley of stuff that Parson probably bought on a whim because he thought it was cool.

“Oy, Berenger, I thought you wanted a nap!”

Augustin follows Kent’s voice down a short hallway. Kent’s standing in the open bedroom about halfway down the hall, arms crossed, like he’s trying to lure Augustin in with a king-sized bed so he can lock him up and throw away the key.

The room itself is nice, and pristinely decorated, with that king-sized bed, an antique-looking bedside table, massive windows covered by gauzy curtains, a door which presumably leads to a bathroom and the kicker: shelves and shelves of books, a wall-to-wall medley of antique and vintage wooden bookshelves bending from the weight of their volumes.

“You know how to read?” Augustin asks, dropping his suitcase in the corner. He approaches the nearest shelf, which is filled with old antique books that have peeling leather bindings and is scattered with shiny bits and bobs, and a metric fuckton of candles in colourful jars.

“My sister usually stays here when she visits,” Parson says begrudgingly, “Those are hers. There were too many to fit at my mom’s place, so when she moved out for college, I had her ship them here.”

“I assume she decorated?”

“Why?”

“Because the room looks nice.” Augustin says, sitting in the massive armchair tucked into the corner by the window. Parson stares at him for a few moments, his expression unreadable, so Augustin throws him a bone and says, “When should I set an alarm for?”

“Six,” Parson says, his voice clipped. “We’ll leave at six-thirty. Don’t burn any of the candles.”

He turns on his heel and shuts the door behind him. Augustin listens for his footsteps receding down the hall. His head is suddenly too heavy for his neck. He sheds his suit, hanging it carefully in the closet next to a few dresses and shirts that are also presumably Kent’s sister’s, unless Parson has a secret crossdressing thing going on.

“Nah, too small,” he says to himself, looking at the frock hanging in the far corner. Parson's about as straight as an arrow anyway, no way he'd be caught dead in a sundress.

That thought takes up about all the energy he has left, because he crashes face-first into the bed and passes out before he can think any more about it.

---

Kent’s gonna kill his new roommate. He can’t call Beth about it, because she has a wider murderous streak than him, so he calls his mom instead.

“Hey sweetie,” she says when she picks up the phone. It’s about seven in New York, and Kent can hear the new dishwasher running in the background. She would’ve just finished dinner. “What’s going on? You never call this late.”

“I’m going to kill Augustin Berenger,” he tells her. Kit, sitting on his chest, rumbles out a purr of agreement. His mother sighs, her voice crackling through the phone.

“Which one is Augustin Berenger?”

“Tall, dark-haired, looks like he walked out of the trenches of World War One. Haggard. Google “asshole” and he should pop up.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Fine,” Kent says generously, “He just got traded from the Canadiens for Genie. Augustin Berenger. No E at the end of Augustin, B-E-R-E-N-G-E-R.”

He can hear his mother tapping out the name on her laptop, and she sighs again when the search presumably loads, “Oh, Kent.”

Here’s the thing: Kent is fully aware, or at least mostly aware, of how the whole thing looks to his mom. She sees a tall, handsome, dark-haired Quebecois hockey player who seems to be allergic to smiling at the camera, and she sees Jack, the man who broke her little boy’s heart.

Sometimes (most of the time), Kent feels guilty about the whole thing: not only did his mom have to listen to him claw at his own skin about Jack’s abandonment for years, but she and Alicia Zimmermann had been thick as thieves until their sons fucked it all up. They still get tea together whenever Alicia is in New York, but it’s a far cry from what they once had. Kent may have bought his mom a bigger house, but he took that away from her, and the guilt still sours in his stomach.

“It’s not like that,” he says as reassuringly as he can. Augustin is handsome as the devil, but Kent’s learned his lesson, and he also can’t stand the fucking sight of him. “He’s pissing me off, that’s all. And he’s staying with me, which means I have to be a good host, and-”

He breaks it off before he can say the worst part: he doesn’t know what the hell happened at practice, but he knows that it was phenomenal, verging on perfect. It feels like a betrayal: to Genie and Swoops, to Makela, who’s earned a spot on the first line through blood, sweat and tears, and…

It feels like he’s betraying Jack. He's not supposed to be this good at hockey with somebody else. He thought those days were over.

“Well, sweetie, you’ve always been such a charismatic kid,” his mother says, “I used to tell your dad that you could convince a hungry lion not to eat you. I’m sure you can convince this Augustin to be more amicable.”

“Yeah,” he mutters. Amicable and Augustin go about as well together as sodium and water. “When he wakes up, I’ll beat him over the head with it.”

“Are you talking about him like this while he’s in your apartment? Kent Vincent Parson! I raised you better than that.”

“Right,” he replies cheekily. “You only shit-talk outside the house.”

They talk for a little longer about his mom’s job at the public library, her fights with the city council about funding free tutoring for at-risk youth, and her newfound fascination with squash, until she starts yawning and he lets her go so she can check in with Beth before she goes to bed.

“Love you, sweetie.” She says. Kent clings to it, forcing his voice to be casual.

“Love you too, Mom. Ask Beth about magic mushrooms, but don’t tell her I told you.”

Three minutes later, Beth texts him: You fucking SNITCH.

Kit pounces off his chest when he gets up off the couch, and he pads quietly down the hallway, stopping momentarily to peer into the spare bedroom with its door slightly ajar. Augustin is lying on his stomach in only his boxers, dark hair stark against the white pillows dyed gold by the sunset. Kent’s eyes trail the muscles of his bare back and the line of his spine before he continues on to his room.

If only, he thinks sarcastically.

He’s getting dressed when he hears the phone alarm go off, and Augustin stirring in the other room. There’s stomping, and then the sound of the shower running. When Kent walks back out again dressed in jeans and a grey-striped flannel with his hair only temporarily tamed by gel and water, the bedroom door is firmly shut.

There’s a text from Swoops waiting for him: Can you ask Augustin what he wants to drink? All I have is diet ginger ale .

Kent hesitates, leaning against the kitchen island. If he doesn’t ask now, Swoops won’t have time to grab any supplies, but he can’t just barge into the guest shower and demand to know Augustin’s beverage of choice. Part of him wants to ignore it, but this isn’t a favour to Augustin. It’s a favour to Swoops.

He takes a chance and sends back: he says waters fine

A minute later, Swoops replies: water’s* and yeah that sounds about right

Kent looks up when the guest bedroom opens, and Augustin walks out. For a moment, Kent feels the gripping and existential fear that is being physically attracted to his teammate, whose dark hair is wavy and damp, and who's wearing dark blue jeans and a crisp slate button-up rolled up to expose his forearms.

Luckily, he quickly remembers that Augustin told him his goal was ugly like, two hours ago, and the feeling goes away pretty quickly.

“How was your day at the stock exchange?” he asks. “Did you short the housing market again?”

“Nice baseball cap,” Augustin replies without missing a beat, “Does it come in adult sizes?”

“Oh yeah, because I’m short,” Kent grumbles, grabbing his keys from the hook on the wall. “Swoops wanted me to ask you what drinks you want. All he has is diet ginger ale.”

“Water’s fine,” Augustin replies. Kent throws his spare apartment key at his head, and Augustin catches it neatly. “Key to your sex dungeon?”

“Yeah, you can ask Mike for directions.”

“This is gonna be a fun year.” Augustin says ominously as he follows Kent out of the apartment.

The drive is mostly silent between them because Kent blasts Britney Spears so loud that Augustin is glaring daggers into his head the whole time.

“I’m going to roll out into traffic,” he threatens in the brief gap between songs.

“Oh no,” Kent says and then turns up the volume for Gimme More. When he starts singing, Augustin slams his head against the passenger window and groans out loud.

Swoops’ house is in the suburbs, one of those gated communities where each McMansion looks the same and feels the same, like a dystopian community for dolls. He was swindled into buying it after his contract extension by a shady real-estate agent who dipped out the second Swoops signed the deed. Swoops deals with this by regularly pissing off the local homeowners association.

“Huh,” Augustin says as they pass by the thick, tall hedges lining the front of Swoops’ house, strung up with obnoxious flashing Christmas lights. “When he told me about this, I really thought he was kidding.”

“Swoops and Debra at the Homeowners Association have been at war for a few years now,” Kent says, ringing the doorbell. There’s a patter of feet, and then Scraps yanks open the door. Inside the house, a smoke alarm is going off.

“Oh,” Scraps says dejectedly when he sees them, and calls over his shoulder, “It’s not the pizza guy.”

“Fuck!” Swoops shouts from deep inside the bowels of the house. Across the street, Debra’s lights flicker on.

“He burnt the lasagna,” Kent surmises, kicking off his shoes as they enter the vestibule. Scraps shakes his head.

“It was inedible before that, anyways,” he shrugs, “How’s domestic co-existence?”

“Fine,” Augustin answers before Kent can lie. “I took the greatest nap of my life.”

“Ah,” Scraps says cryptically, “The boys are just down the hall, you can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” Augustin says, padding down the hallway and disappearing into Swoops’ living room. Kent blows out a long breath.

“It’s that bad?” Scraps asks.

“No, he really did take a nap,” he replies, taking off his cap and scrubbing the back of his head. “But he’s not gonna nap forever.”

“Well yeah, the forever nap means you’ll be going to jail for murder, dude.” Scraps jokes as they amble into the living room. Everyone’s already there: Makela, Allie and Frisk, Linksy, Smitty, and one of the older D-men, Ethan Cross. They’re all watching Linsky destroy Cross at Streetfighter, while Swoops curses up a storm from the kitchen. The smoke alarm is still beeping.

“Can somebody get that?” Swoops cries. Nobody listens, too engrossed by the TV, except Augustin. He slips out and the beeping stops a second later. He walks back in tossing the smoke alarm’s batteries from hand to hand.

“Think fast,” he says, and pitches them at Kent. They hit his sternum hard enough to hurt, and Kent barely fumbles them into his hands before they can hit the hardwood floor.

When the pizzas arrive, Kent goes out to pay for them, partly because he feels bad foisting all the team functions onto Swoops these days, and partly because Debra is lurking on her front deck waiting for Swoops to emerge, presumably so she can beat his knees in with a tire iron. He touts the boxes back in, and the animals in the living room don’t even get plates before they fall ravenously onto the food.

“Chad’s gonna kill us,” Scraps says around a mouthful of pepperoni, “He thought we would be having vegetarian lasagna tonight.”

“The cheese is low-fat,” Kent replies, though everyone seems to know that this means nothing to a nutritionist.

“The lasagna was vegetarian?” Smitty asks, disgusted, “It was God’s will that it burned.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Swoops says grumpily from the couch. “Come play me and we’ll see who God’s will actually favours.”

Linsky, Frisk, and Allie blend into the team's fabric seamlessly, but Augustin lingers on the edge of the room, palming a glass of water as he watches rather than speaks. He looks almost nervous, if Kent has to guess what emotions are swimming under his wax face, but if he ever said that out loud, he’s pretty sure Augustin would kill him in his sleep.

“That was some skating in practice,” Cross tells Augustin at some point, “Where’ve you been hiding that?”

“Up my ass,” Augustin deadpans back, clearly unwilling to divulge more, but Cross is a hockey player and therefore in the business of being nosy.

“Nah, seriously, the Habs were underutilizing you. Fuck, I mean, if you play like that in a game, the Rangers should have signed you to a way more expensive contract. You’re a steal.”

“If,” Kent mutters to Swoops, who swats him on the leg.

“He played like that in Sochi.”

Yeah, Kent remembers that clearly, because he was on the receiving end of that fateful semi-final game. He’s got the distinct absence of a medal to prove it. “That was a while ago.”

“And what do you have against Ron Arsineaux?” Frisk is asking, his German accent heavy as he takes a drink of his fourth beer. Augustin’s face contorts into an ugly sneer.

“He’s a fucking dick.”

Ron Arsineaux, who runs a sports website that’s the equivalent of Deadspin and Us Weekly having a fucked up demon baby, actually is a fucking dick. He’s also been hounding Augustin since his time in Juniors when Augustin told him to shove a stick somewhere anatomically incorrect after a shutout loss.

“Is he the one who started the rumour about you and the Aeros’ owner?” Smitty asks. Augustin’s face grows stormier.

“Among other things.”

“What a dick,” Linsky mutters. Kent agrees, but doesn’t vocalize it. Everyone knows that Ron Arsineaux is a stain on sports journalism, including most sports journalists themselves. He once published a story about Kent hiring escorts for his twenty-first birthday party, which was both incorrect and greatly insulting. Just because Kent doesn’t go out with women doesn’t mean he can’t pull one. He pulls.

For some unfathomable reason, that line of thought rings hollow.

Augustin is silent and stormy for the rest of the night, and Kent notices that he doesn’t touch the food that ravenously disappears into everyone else’s mouths so quickly that nobody else notices that their new star winger hasn’t touched any. Great, just what he needs. Another angry linemate with some sort of fucked up habit for him to take care of.

He realizes he's been glaring at Augustin for the past fifteen minutes when Makela says, "Parse, you all good?"

"Yup," Kent says, pasting a smile onto his face. "Pass me a controller so I can destroy Swoops."

Everyone else is tipsy from the beer when Swoops corners Kent in the kitchen an hour later, while he's rinsing out cans for the recycling bin.

“Cut him some slack.”

Kent watches beer-flavoured water dribble out of the can in his hand, “What?”

“You’re riding his ass,” Swoops says seriously, even though he’s a couple beers in and his eyelids are still starting to droop. “Berenger’s. He just got here, and I know he’s been annoying you, but think about the shit people say about him. It’s his first day and he’s probably still adjusting to the trade.”

“I’m just worried about how many of the rumours are true.” Kent replies, tossing another empty can into the plastic blue bin, where it settles with a rattle.

“It’s just-”

“Spit it out, Troy.”

“Fine,” Swoops scowls, “Scraps said that you haven’t been this much of a jackass since you went to visit Zimmermann at Samwell, and he’s right.”

The next can lands with a sound like a firework exploding. Kent braces his hands on either side of the sink. So that’s where the feeling of pressure building in his chest is familiar from. He exhales long and slow, to see if it alleviates the feeling. No dice. “We’re all adjusting, okay? We’ll get there. I’m just tired and rattled from so much change.”

That seems to placate Swoops, who gives him a gentle pat on the back. It’s a well-documented fact that Kent hates change: if something works, why does it need to be different? For all intents and purposes, his life worked pretty well the way it was, all things considered. Losing Genie had been hard enough, but losing Swoops was just another drop in an overflowing bucket. Kent doesn’t trust a lot of people, but he trusts Jeff, and now Jeff is gone. Well, not gone, just replaced, but he might as well be in Montreal with Genie for all the good that does Kent's fucked up head.

“I’m gonna start kicking people out now.” Swoops says, “Stop in a drive-thru on your way back. You didn’t fucking eat anything, you moron.”

Kent realizes that he's right when his stomach gives an almighty growl.

He’s only had one beer, so he gets all the others into cabs while Augustin helps Swoops clean up.

"We're totally gonna beat the Ducks tomorrow," Smitty giggles delightedly as Kent and Scraps bundle him into a taxi. "You and me, Parse, and Gus. We're gonna shoot us some water...waterfouls."

"Uh-huh." Kent says, "Take an Advil before you go to bed."

"Aye-aye, cap'n."

Once everyone has gone home, he palms his keys as Augustin follows him out of Swoops’ house, bidding their host goodnight inside the foyer so that he doesn’t have to brave the scrutiny of the homeowner’s association. Augustin flicks one of the Christmas lights on his way by.

“We’re going to a drive-thru,” Kent announces when they shut the car doors. “Do you want burgers or tacos?”

“I’m not-” Augustin cuts himself off before Kent can call bullshit, “Burgers.”

So they go to the closest burger place that’s open. Kent orders them each two lettuce-wrapped burgers, Augustin sticks his credit card out the window before Kent can fumble out his wallet, and they both sign a napkin for the kid who takes their order. He and Augustin devour their food in the parking lot, listening to the ambient sounds of the highway. He notes that Augustin is hosing his second burger, and something settles in his stomach. So he does eat.

Not everyone is fucked up. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that.

“Ron Arsineaux will be at the game tomorrow,” he says once they've finished, as he pulls the car back onto the highway. Augustin takes a measured sip of lemonade.

“I figured.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Augustin is silent for a moment, and then says quietly, “Dunno. Is it a problem when you’re in Providence?”

Logically, Kent knows he’s talking about the article Arsineaux wrote about the first Aces/Falconers match after Jack signed with Providence. It was all the normal bullshit: Kent and Jack, and the bad blood that nobody actually knew anything about. But at that moment, he panics. His mind goes blindingly white, and all he can think is that Augustin has to know something.

There’s something to be said for the fight or flight instinct. They’re locked in the car together, so there’s really only one mechanism Kent can trigger.

“Do you make it your life’s mission to piss off everyone that matters on every team you play with?” It comes out nastier than he means it to, with a mean bite to it.

“Wow,” Augustin says mildly, “Who can I piss off, then? Who should I let know that their captain thinks they don’t matter?”

“Oh, I think you piss off pretty much every team you play on.”

“Huh,” Augustin drawls, a slow smile spreading over his face. “Not this one. It drives you crazy, doesn’t it? You’re pissed that you clocked me wrong. It’s okay, Parson. We all have our weak spots. Let's not pretend you don't have yours.”

There’s something to be said for the fight or flight instinct, especially in a kid like the one Kent used to be, who grew up in Lower Manhattan on food stamps, with a dead dad and hand-me-down hockey gear. He bites often, and he barks like he means it. It’s a defense mechanism that he should have outgrown a long time ago, but sometimes it comes back. There’s a saying like that: you can take the dog out of the fight, but you can’t take the fight out of the dog.

“Yeah, because you’re famous for fitting in well in every team you’ve ever been on.” he laughs humourlessly, words tumbling from his mouth before he can screen them properly. “It's fine. All I have to do is wait for you to inevitably show everyone what a fucked-up asshole you are, and you’ll be someone else’s problem. God, what I wouldn’t give to bounce you back to the fucking Aeros, if they didn’t already fucking want you dead.”

The car is suddenly very quiet, except for the sound of the engine. Augustin stares at him, and Kent runs through what he just said, feeling the blood leave his face as he hears what a mythic fucking asshole he just was. Augustin’s been driving him up the wall all day, but he hasn’t done or said anything nearly that bad. Nearly that personal. And it’s not like he doesn’t have the ammunition.

He opens his mouth to apologize, but nothing comes out. His pride won’t it happen.

The worst part is that the first thing he feels is disappointment that he just gave Augustin the moral high ground.

“Yeah,” Augustin finally sighs, closing his eyes. In the light from the streetlamps, he looks like a corpse, all the fight suddenly bled out of him. “Whatever.”

They don’t speak for the rest of the night.

Notes:

Kent "word vomit" Parson

Chapter 3

Summary:

In which good fucking hockey, a wager, and beating the shit out of the Anaheim Ducks fixes most problems

The sound of French in the locker room is something Kent has had to acclimate to over the years, but usually it’s Quebecois French, almost unintelligible to him, like a whole ‘nother language. Jack, separated from his Quebecois peers from a young age, couldn’t speak it other than the odd church-themed curse. This French is more formal, closer to France-French, the kind that Jack spoke.

If Kent squints, letting his eyes go fuzzy, that’s who he sees standing out in the hallway half-dressed with his phone pressed to his ear. Thank God their voices are nothing alike.

“Non, c’est ridicule. Les chandails d'entraînement ressemblent de la pisse de chien. Woah-la! Je dirai à maman que-tu as dit ça.” Augustin’s tenor grows softer, “ouais, c'est ça…non, je ne lui donnerai pas “what for.” C’est n’est pas 1950…ay, je m’en sacre. Ouais…ouais. De rien. Je t’aime aussi. Bye.”

Kent leans his head down to tie his skates, making sure it’s not completely obvious that he was listening to Augustin tell his sister that their practice jerseys look like dog piss and something about it not being the 1950s anymore. He’s also not sure who’s being given “what for,” but he has a few guesses and the first one rhymes with Tent Arson.

Augustin still hasn’t said more than one word to him since last night, and the word was “okay” when Kent asked him to lock the door when they left this morning. It’s lucky that today’s game is a Sunday matinee: he thinks a few more hours alone with Augustin in the apartment might have actually driven him insane.

The media girl who filmed them when they walked in is named Nira. She’s an intern from the sports media program at UNLV, and Kent’s a big fan of what she’s done to the Aces social media presence since she took over their Instagram from Joan, who’s forty-seven and really sweet, but doesn’t know what a hashtag is. She’s also not shy about telling players to redo anything when they’ve fucked up.

This time, he flashed her a signature smile and a peace sign around his travel mug, and she gave him a thumbs-up from behind the camera. Augustin, on the other hand, breezed right past her with his sunglasses still on. When she tried to get him to take them off for another go, he just kept walking.

“What crawled up his ass and died?” she asked Kent once Augustin had disappeared around the corner.

“He’s jet-lagged,” Kent explained, watching Augustin leave him behind without a backward glance. “Don’t hold it against him.”

He's already holding it against himself pretty well. He had to resist the urge to text Jack about it last night, because he's already exhausted all his other means of receiving advice.

Hey Jack, remember Augustin Berenger? Yeah, the guy you hated in Juniors. Well, I don't know if you've seen the news, but he's my new linemate, and we're living together, but I completely fucked up any working relationship we might have had. Sound familiar? By the way, how's the wedding planning going?

Forget it. He's not doing well, but he's not fucking insane either.

“Who was on the phone?” Smitty asks salaciously as Augustin ambles back in. Augustin raises an eyebrow at the tone.

“My sister.”

“Oh,” everyone who went to the Olympics in 2014 says almost worshipfully, because Angelique Berenger is a legend in the making, the best thing to ever come out of Hockey Canada’s women’s program. Kent tries to imagine being Mr. and Mrs. Berenger, with three Olympic gold medals on their wall for them to show off to visitors and guests.

She’s also, according to general consensus, a fucking rocket. Kent, who doesn’t have as much of a barometer for that kind of thing, looks over at her little brother and concurs that if she looks anything like him, she must be. According to Beth, girls always tend to be more attractive than guys anyhow.

“Angelique Berenger,” Swoops mutters to him, a little bit too dreamily. “God, what a pair of mitts she has.”

Kent snorts and says loud enough for Augustin to hear, “Imagine being in the NHL and still the worst hockey player out of your siblings.”

He means it kindly to Angelique, who is taller than him by a few inches and whom Augustin has always been vocal about defending to the press whenever someone brings up their thinly veiled anti-women’s-league schtick. He just wants to rattle Augustin in a friendly way, something to dissolve the awkwardness slightly. He vastly misjudges the trajectory.

“That’s fucking right,” Augustin says hotly, stopping all conversation in its tracks. “Got anything else to say about my sister, captain?”

“Only that if you play like she does, maybe you’ll actually break a sixty-point season.” Kent retorts, injecting good humour into his voice to placate the silent dressing room. Augustin’s fists are balled, like he actually believes Kent’s being a sexist dick to his sister on purpose. Kent tries not to be hurt about that, but then again, he’s said worse things to Augustin’s face.

“Ooooooh” Frisk and Allie chime in tandem, and Augustin breaks the tension to swat Frisk on the leg, though he still twists his head to glare at Kent as he gets up and walks over to the bathroom.

“Parse,” Swoops says warningly, and Kent feels his lungs deflate.

“Yeah, I know. I was trying to- I’ll talk to him before warmups.”

“Why not now?”

Kent jerks his chin to where Augustin is, and Swoops makes a soft noise of understanding.

“Yeah, maybe not, considering what you just said. He might stab you with it.”

Augustin’s leaning over the sink with a black eyeliner pencil, carefully filling in his waterline. Kent remembers the interview where he talked about it; something about reducing glare from the ice, and how snowboarders do it, and if anyone tries to call him a pussy about it they can talk to his fist (or something equally drenched in machismo). Fucking drama queen, but Kent doesn’t want his ass kicked about toxic perceptions of masculinity or whatever Beth’s paying fifty-thousand dollars a year to learn about.

To be fair, it does make for a pretty dramatic picture. By the end of the second period, it’s always bleeding down his face from the sweat and blinking, and he doesn’t clean it off between periods either, a distracting texture that would drive Kent up the wall. When they had first signed him to that ludicrously lowballed contract, the Canes had made him the face of October in their player calendar, black tears and all. It’s an unsettling thing to see on the ice when you have to look at it dead-on.

“Goddamn,” Scraps says loudly when Augustin comes back in, eyes lined in pitch-black that makes them so big and uncanny that Kent feels like he needs to avert his gaze. “Your mom teach you how to do that?”

“It was your mom, actually.” Augustin shoots right back, “She took me to Milan Fashion Week and did me up while we were in bed together.”

“As long as you were a gentleman,” Scraps says with dignity, which breaks Linsky into giggles. Kent hates to say it, but if he hadn’t been the sole recipient of Augustin’s raging and bitching, he wouldn’t know what the hell all the journos were talking about. The only tension Augustin is party to is the tension that Kent inadvertently caused. The locker room hasn’t been this limber before a game since they last clinched a playoff berth.

That same shitty part of his brain wonders if it’s what he said to Augustin that’s causing him to be so…amicable.

Wilson comes in once everyone is dressed and ready to give them a rundown of the new lineups, even though they already know what’s coming. “The starting line is going to be Smith, Parson, and Berenger. D-men, Ahlgren and Frisk. Scarpello in net.” He brandishes his notepad at them, "Let's get a win this time, boys."

“Kent,” Swoops says as they make their way down the tunnel for warm-ups. “If you’ve fucked this up somehow, I’ll actually kill you.”

Kent cranes his neck back to look at Augustin, who stares back expressionlessly. There’s no animosity in those dark eyes, there’s nothing at all except something hungry, a familiar look from when Kent looks into mirrors before big games and sees his face reflected back at him. Whatever slimy thing has developed between them in the last twenty-four hours, Kent can at least be assured that it’s not going to leak all over the game.

“It’s gonna be fine.”

It’s technically not Linsky’s first game, he was called up for two away games when Scraps was injured last year, so they don’t send him around the rink alone. They do send Allie, Frisk, and Augustin out for a quick introductory lap, which Allie loves and Augustin clearly hates.

When they line up for the anthem, Kent and Augustin have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Kent is perilously aware not only of how short he looks in comparison, but that it’s the closest they’ve physically been to each other since he opened his fat mouth. Augustin sways back and forth gently as they all stare up at the jumbotron, glowing silver and white far above the dark ice. His hair is scraped back with a headband, a single dark curl escaping and dangling across his forehead.

“Take it off,” Kent reminds him as casually as he can. They didn’t have time to film an intro tape for him yet, so the media team is making do with a camera in real time. They’d wanted him to take off his neck guard too, something about him looking like he’s wearing a turtleneck, but Augustin had been ready to die on that hill.

His face doesn’t change, but his eyes tighten as he takes the headband off and shakes his dark hair loose, damp waves falling over his forehead. Kent taps his stick gently against a black-clad shinpad, and tries not to let his mouth go dry about the stark contrast between pale skin and dark hair, strong nose and sharp jaw. Augustin doesn’t react to his tap, headband clenched in a gloved hand.

“Starting on the right, from Port Huron, Michigan, number 23, DEVON SMITH!”

Smitty grins into the camera aimed at his face, chipped teeth flashing as he waves his black glove. He’s loving every minute of exposure he can get, because he’s nineteen and he’s probably not sure when it’s going to end. The bared teeth are cheerful and feral at the same time.

“Starting on the left, number 7, from Baie-Comeau, Canada, AUGUSTIN BERENGER.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kent sees Augustin’s mouth flatten. His gentle swaying ceases completely until he’s staring directly into the camera, a stony mask affixed and dark-lined eyes narrowed. The crowd loves it. They go wild, screaming his Anglicized name, but they don’t know that Augustin isn’t just another Vegas show pony putting on a face for their amusement. That hunger is real.

“And at center, your number 90, all the way from the Big Apple,” the whole crowd joins in to shout, “KENT PARSON.”

He flashes a cocky smile of his own, and is heartened to find that it's mostly real. This is his ice. This is his house, and this is Vegas, where the house always wins.

As the anthem starts, the crowd’s energy flows through Kent like a livewire; down through the air, lighting up his nerves, and grounding itself in the ice below him. His mind, usually so filled with strategy and plans, goes blissfully blank. He’s not Kent Parson, Aces captain, anymore. He’s Kent, with a stick in his hand and adrenaline coursing through his veins, and he’s here to play some fucking hockey.

The last time this feeling happened like this, he won the Stanley Cup.

When he lines up at center ice, and the Ducks’ center is glaring at him dead in the eyes, all Kent can do is laugh in his face just before the puck hits the ground and he’s slamming his shoulder forward. This is his game. Everyone else is just visiting.

There’s an unparalleled adrenaline in hockey that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, except maybe on race car tracks and in fighter jets. The world is wide and tiny at the same time, and the thud of his heartbeat is the harmony to the melody of blades scraping ice, sticks crashing together, the rumble and rattle of bodies hitting the boards. To Kent, it’s the world’s greatest symphony. To experience all that alone is a privilege he will cling to until his dying day. To experience it with someone else is another sensation entirely, one he thought would be gone forever.

But when he looks to his left, cold air whistling through his lungs, Augustin is always right there with him.

It's not like in practice, a microcosm of the same players Kent knows like the back of his hand. It's the Ducks, who are as hungry for this as Kent is, and so they give it to him and they don't let up, but somehow…

“Ahlgren to Smith, Smith in the corner digging, Smith to Berenger who takes it wide, to Parson- SCORES! A beautiful one-timer from Kent Parson opens the scoring, fifty-two seconds into the period!”

Oh God. He's having the time of his life.

A breathless scream of sheer joy pulls itself from his lungs as Smitty slams into him, scrubbing his smelly glove into Kent’s visor. Between the fingers, he meets Augustin’s gaze. He’s still not smiling, eyes dark and narrowed. Kent can hear his voice in his head as he high-fives his team and lines up at center ice.

You want penance? Do that again.

So he does. With eight minutes left in the first, he scores another one, an incredible cycle of passes that completely befuddles the Ducks’ defensemen and results in another perfect shot into open net. It’s going to be at the top of every Play-of-the-Month compilation. With thirty-one seconds left, he feeds Augustin an impossible pass from the corner, and Augustin isn’t even looking when he slams it home. It’s beautiful.

Augustin screams as he glides away from the net, a wordless sound from deep in his chest as all of his tightly controlled composure falls away for a brief moment of sheer, wild joy. He crashes into Kent, nearly bowling him over as the rest of the line piles in and rubs their gloves over his helmet, and Kent thinks: this is what I've been waiting for. He feels immortal, on top of the world. His blood rushes through his veins and all he can hear is the roar of the crowd as the buzzer goes.

For his last goal, Augustin gets pulled aside after the period ends for the press. Kent can hear it from inside the dressing room as he rubs an ice pack against his overheated hands.

“You historically have had trouble gelling with your linemates, but we clearly aren’t seeing that today. What’s so different about playing with the Aces?”

Augustin is famous for his refusal to give hockey sound-bite answers. He speaks into mics like he’s delivering a political manifesto, no trailing uhs or stock phrases like “the boys are getting pucks in deep.” This is no exception.

“Part of it is Smith and Parson, their sense of the ice and movement of play is unmatched as far as I’m concerned. But most of it is that, as much as I liked playing in Montreal, this is the first time a team has actually given me a chance to prove myself right off the bat.” His tone grows ice-cold and biting, “It’s hard to be a productive player when you’re playing two teams at once.”

“Sounds like you have some hard feelings.” Someone else says. Kent recognizes the nasally voice of Ron Arsineaux, “Is this about the Canes, Rangers, or Aeros?”

“No comment.” Augustin replies like a gunshot. “Have fun twisting that one, Ron, you’ve been pretty flexible lately.”

Swoops, also clearly eavesdropping, snorts, “PR is gonna rip him a new asshole for that.”

Kent doesn’t find it funny.

Augustin stomps back into the room, and it’s like getting a bucket of water dumped on their heads. His eyeliner is already beginning to streak, and the cutting focus is gone, evaporated as if it never existed. Kent knows his own anger drives him to play better, faster, harder. He knows how to use it as gasoline, turning it into spite and vicious glee. Augustin, on the other hand, plays everything cool, a puppet-master craving control. Anger is his weakness. Anger makes him stupid.

Ron fucking Arsineaux.

“Augustin,” he tries as they line up to get back on the bench. “You can’t let it get to you.”

Augustin smacks his hand away, “Don’t fucking condescend to me, asshole.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to do anything I’m famous for doing,” Augustin snarls as they jump onto the ice.

Predictably, the next period is shit.

They miss passes, so Smitty panics and starts throwing his body around, tossing pucks into empty ice to be scooped up. Augustin’s mouth starts running the second his skates hit the ice, and for every penalty he draws, he’s getting one of his own. The Ducks score twice on the powerplay, both times while Augustin sits fuming in the box, and the Aces slink off the ice after twenty grueling minutes up by one measly goal.

PR doesn’t need to rip Augustin a new one. Wilson does it for them, reaming them out in an utterly deserved fashion, and Augustin most of all, for both of his stupid penalties. Augustin’s skin is streaked with grey, and he’s biting the inside of his cheeks mutinously, Kent can tell from the divots appearing in his face.

He’s the captain. He’s supposed to know what to say to pick up his team. He gives them a rousing battle speech to get them going once Wilson has stormed off back to the bench, and it gets most of them fired up and ready to roast a duck or two. Augustin is still glaring daggers at the ground. His hands clench and unclench rhythmically.

Contrary to popular belief, Kent’s not stupid. He figured out that he was being played. He realized it in a cold sweat last night while lying in bed, listening to Augustin talk quietly to his sister in the other room. So when the boys line up outside the bench before the start of the third, he leans against the wall next to Augustin and coolly says: “I fucking knew it.”

“Knew what?” Augustin grits out, looking up with murder in his eyes. For a moment, Kent can’t breathe. A lot of people watch him, they pay to watch him, but it’s not often that someone really looks. Augustin’s looking like he wants to kill Kent, but looking nonetheless.

“You’re all bark and no bite,” he says, voice carefully casual, dancing around what they both know and won’t say. “Guess who gets the last laugh? Ron fucking Arsineaux, because you can’t control yourself. I thought you were smarter than that, but I guess not. It’s whatever. You’re just here to play games, not to play hockey. At least I can do both.”

Augustin shoots to his feet, towering over Kent and glaring down at him with his fists balled. “Fucking say that again, Parson.”

“Fucking prove me wrong.” Kent grins over his shoulder, strolling away like he’s on a walk to church. He’s thrown his gauntlet down, but it’s not the insults that do it. It’s the fact that he’s finally caught onto Augustin’s little gamble, and it's only taken him a day to notice that Augustin can’t stand not being the smartest person in the room.

“Mon tabarnak j'vais te décâlisser la yeule, calisse,” Augustin shouts after him. “I know what you’re doing, Parson!”

Kent doesn’t look back, even when he hears the stomp of skates and feels Augustin knock him a foot forward as he shoulders past him. Cross, who also played in the Q long before Kent did, turns to Kent and asks rather politely, “Why is Berenger threatening to, uh…beat your fucking face in?”

“I’m a good captain,” Kent replies, hopping the boards to join his line on the ice.

The third period is always the hardest, even though most players lag in the second and bounce back at the end. Kent’s legs are starting to hurt, his body tires more quickly, and a bit of fog is descending over his brain. As he gets ready to line up, something bumps hard into his back.

“It’s on, Parson,” Augustin says lowly in his ear. Kent cranes his head up to look into dark-lined eyes. Those are fighting words, and since they can’t drop gloves, they can only make bets. He grins.

“Yeah? Let's make it official. First to seventy points wins.” he goads, “Loser owes the winner their season bonus.”

“That’s a lot more money for me to win than for you,” Augustin notes. “Especially considering that I’m up by one already.”

“If you want to do math, do math,” Kent tosses over his shoulder as they line up for the faceoff. “I’m amenable to different terms.”

“Would you shut your fucking mouth, Parson?” The Ducks center gripes, and Kent leans down to leer at him, eyes tracking the puck as the referee prepares to drop it.

“Naw,” he says, and flicks the puck back to Cross before the Duck can even get his stick on it.

The Ducks can smell blood and they think they have all the time in the world to get two goals as long as the Aces continue to fold in on themselves. Kent has no interest in folding. He’s on the ice for a minute at a time, and he’s going to make all of his shifts count.

Augustin expertly draws another penalty, a slash to the shin for a passing chirp that nets them a powerplay. It’s clear, as they maneuver around the zone, that he wants to get the goal in quickly so he can have as many chances as possible, but Kent has a reputation for being a little flashy and playing with his food, and by God, he’s going to use it.

Smitty is the one who ends up putting it in the net after a set of passes the Ducks could barely track, and Augustin glares at Kent when it’s Frisk who gets credited with the second assist.

“Can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” Kent chirps as they clamber back onto the bench.

“Va te faire foutre,” Augustin grumbles. Kent recognizes that one.

The Ducks end up pulling their goalie with three minutes left. Augustin checks the defender and puts one in the empty net thirty seconds later, unassisted. He doesn’t even celebrate, just sighs melodramatically, which makes Smitty laugh and immediately pisses off the Ducks defender. There’s a scrum, and Kent finds himself in the middle of it, hauling someone off of Augustin by their visor.

“Get off my face, Parson!”

“Is this what living in Anaheim does to you?” Kent gives the visor a shake before letting it go. “Thanks for helping us break our streak.”

The guy tries to potshot him and gets himself two minutes for roughing. Augustin, helmet knocked off and headband askew, laughs at that as he gets escorted away by referees, the first real smile Kent has seen on his face since he was traded. The first real smile he’s seen on Augustin since the Q, if he really thinks about it.

Kent’s line isn’t on the ice for those two minutes, and by the time they get back on, there’s not enough time to score another goal, but it’s a win in the books, and he feels the pressure of their losing streak slide off his back. It’s not just the win, either. Augustin looks over at him as they make their way off the ice, mouth bent into a not-frown, and he shakes his head in exasperation when Kent grins cheekily at him. Kent can see his mouth twitching, struggling not to smile, and can only beam wider at the sight of it.

They make him do press, where he’s grinning like a fiend the whole time rather than his usual carefully curated smirk. He can’t help it. The adrenaline mixed with euphoria is a hell of a drug. He can’t even be pissed that Ron Arsineaux is front and center with his recorder shoved under Kent’s chin.

“What a fantastic game for your line,” someone says, “Three points for both you and Augustin Berenger, and two points for Devon Smith. What do you think worked so well for you?”

“Man, I mean, Smitty’s been a beauty on our third line and uh, I think getting to play up on the first has been a great motivator for him, he’s been really solid this season and, you know, uh…it’s good that he’s getting the recognition he deserves.”

So he’s not as eloquent as Augustin is. Sue him.

“And what about Berenger?” Ron Arsineaux asks. Multiple other journalists roll their eyes, but Ron is either too stupid to notice or too much of an asshole to care, “He’s had trouble on every team he’s been on. Has this experience been any more difficult or different than playing with Sokolov and Troy?”

Kent’s euphoria abates just enough for him to look Ron dead in the eyes and say: “Of course it’s different. Jeff, Genie and I won a Cup together, and playing with them for the past few years has been great. But I’ve never played better hockey than I have with Augustin Berenger.”

It’s a tactical error on his part. Ron’s beady little eyes are malicious as he asks his follow-up. “Not even with Jack Zimmermann?”

The lights are suddenly very bright. It’s hot in here, and he can feel sweat leaking down his back underneath his equipment, which is starting to itch and chafe. He can see Nira and Jessica from the PR office staring at him from over the journos’ shoulders, motioning for him to say something, anything. How long has he been silent? Two seconds? Three? He inhales sharply.

“They play very different styles of hockey,” he finally manages to say, “I’m looking forward to seeing how our play continues to develop, but I think we all saw how well it’s already working. Thank you.”

He turns away, and the euphoria is gone.

Notes:

the playoffs are so stressful i think i'm getting an ulcer

Chapter 4

Summary:

In which a bet is set in stone, things are still a little weird, and Augustin finally gets laid after eight months

I’ve never played better hockey than I have with Augustin Berenger

When Kent says that from down the hall, everyone cranes their head to look at Augustin. Augustin, on the other hand, is so focused on unlacing his skates and cursing out Ron Arsineaux and Kent Parson in his head that he doesn’t notice that everyone is looking at him until the room is quiet. He looks up.

“What?” he asks, thinking for a moment that someone’s finally going to say something about the eyeliner, like Hannity on the Rangers used to do before Augustin broke him and his girlfriend up, as well as his nose ‘by accident.’ Troy has that same weird, unreadable look on his face from practice the day before.

“Nothing,” he says, and everyone goes back to undressing. Augustin’s tugging his skate off when Kent ambles back into the room looking like he was hit by a truck, and what he just said finally registers in Augustin’s brain.

I’ve never played better hockey than I have with Augustin Berenger

It’s a funny thing. He’s heard something like that before. In his teenage years, he was heralded as the greatest gift to hockey since the Great One, and that praise used to beat through his veins like blood. His teammates at Rouyn-Noranda had been the most vocal about it, talking about how happy and lucky they were to play on his team to any journalist who would listen. Nobody remembers it now, but Augustin used to be a pillar of the hockey world. Now, usually, it’s only him who remembers.

His hands tremble as he unlaces his skates, struggling to undo the knots. He inhales and exhales long and slow, feeling the tilting, misaligned parts of him slowly slip back into place. It’s been a while since anyone has been happy to play with him, but he can’t let it get to his head. The Aeros had been happy to play with him too. Forget better—he’d been the best player of their franchise, once upon a time.

And fucking look how that turned out.

Kent’s looking at him every so often, like he’s afraid that Augustin will confront him about it, but Augustin’s always been very good at compartmentalizing. He’s already tucked away the shit Kent told him last night, somewhere between his liver and kidney where all the toxins in his body end up anyways. He’ll tuck this away as well. Kent, for all his cocksure posturing, is a freakishly emotional guy, so Augustin will easily chalk his praise and insults up to an adrenaline rush and focus on breaking seventy points.

It’s just unfortunate that the car ride back will be painfully awkward again.

He’s wiping off the eyeliner when Kent comes up behind him. He always has trouble with it. No matter how hard he tries to get it off, some of it always lingers in his eyelashes and so he looks like he’s still wearing it for the rest of the day.

“Berenger-”

“You’re such a shitstain for that powerplay goal,” Augustin says before Kent can get a word in edgewise, tossing the wipe into the garbage. He got some of the cleaning liquid in his eye again, and it stings like a bitch as he tries to blink it out. “I was wide open, and you passed it to Frisk instead.”

“It was a better play and you know it.” Kent retorts hotly, which Augustin does in fact know, but at least now they don’t have to talk about their feelings or whatever, “You took two stupid penalties and your fucking eye is red, by the way.”

Augustin glares at him, one eye hazy, “Yeah? I couldn’t tell from the fact that it fucking hurts. If we’re going to play this right, we have to play it fair.”

The wager was born of a few minutes of stupid anger on his part. He hasn’t lost his cool like that in years, not since he left the Aeros, but now that he has himself back under control, there’s still a part of him clawing at the walls to get out and it needs to be appeased. Besides, he has pride, if nothing else, so he’s not about to back down from a bet that he can beat a three-time Art Ross winner to seventy points. It’s the goddamn principle of the thing.

However, it would be a tactical error for him not to acknowledge that Kent got a hundred and sixteen points last season, double Augustin’s total. He has to even the playing field somehow.

“Play it fair,” Kent echoes, “Fine. Are we changing the terms, or is it still prize money?”

It’s not as if Augustin has much dignity left to wager, “Why not both?”

“Boys,” Scraps interrupts, looping an elbow around each of their necks, “Drinks tonight. It’ll be our last chance before the roadie.”

Augustin swallows, feeling his throat bob. He has to force his hands to stop shaking this time by bracing them against the edge of the sink. “I don’t drink.”

“You don’t have to, kid,” Scraps says merrily, “Parser doesn’t drink much during the season either. Nine o’clock, and I better see both of you there. I know where you live.”

He ambles away, whistling gaily. Kent looks over at Augustin, and there’s a mutual agreement to continue the discussion in private. They get dressed and make their way down to the parkade, Augustin writhing against the texture of his suit against his damp skin. The adrenaline still hasn’t faded: he feels itchy all over.

Usually, when he feels like this after a game, he’ll text a guy who doesn’t know a hockey stick from a tennis racket, and go over to his place. But in Montreal, he didn’t have that luxury: everybody there eats and breathes hockey, and there wasn’t a single prospective hookup who didn’t recognize him on sight. He had to live like a goddamn nun unless they had a night off on a road trip, which only happened three times. When he goes back home for the summer, it’s even worse, because everybody there knows him and his mom.

Suffice to say, it’s been about eight months since Augustin’s gotten properly laid, as much as he tries not to think about it. Hopefully Vegas will be good for at least one thing: anonymous and potentially foolhardy sex.

“Dude,” Kent says, “Are you good?”

“Hm?” Augustin looks over at him, and tries to keep his blood circulating normally. Parson’s got his eyes on the road, but his cheeks are still flush from the game and his blond hair is curly and wild from being trapped under his helmet. It’s been eight months, and Augustin is so frayed that for a brief moment of insanity, he’s seriously considering jumping the bones of not just a goddamn blond, but Kent fucking Parson of all people.

Things are worse than he thought.

“You’re gripping the door pretty tight. Did that last slash get you in the ankle?” Kent looks over at him with those pale grey-green eyes as they hit a red, and Augustin realizes that he’s been gripping the inside of the car door with white-knuckled fingers the whole time, hard enough to cause the plastic to creak audibly. “There’s ibuprofen in the glove compartment, but if it hurts, we should-”

“Could you relax, Parson?” Augustin says, releasing his hold on the door slowly. This is getting ridiculous. “You’re not my mommy. I can handle a bruised ankle. Are we talking terms, or what?”

“Well, you were right,” Kent smirks at the road, jerking the car forward so Augustin hits his head against the headrest. “My bonus is bigger than your bonus.”

“And we have to make the playoffs to get it,” Augustin reminds him, rubbing the back of his head. He’s thinking about his spreadsheet again: will Vegas even keep him until his contract expires at the end of the season? He’s finally an unrestricted free agent in June. There are very few teams that would be willing to sign him for what he’s making right now, let alone more, and there’s not a goddamn team in the NHL that would offer him a contract with a no-trade clause.

He has to be sensible. It’s not smart for him to wager the money he has. His mother would kill him, for one.

“Hey, can you pay attention to me, please?” Kent asks, waving his hand in front of Augustin’s nose. “I’m not here to be your chauffeur.”

Augustin bites back a retort about Kent’s attention-seeking tendencies, “So if we’re not betting our bonuses, what the hell else could you possibly want from me?”

“I don’t know,” Kent hums, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, “Why don’t we decide when one of us wins?”

Augustin stares at him, “That’s horrifying.”

“That’s half the fun,” he grins, “Nothing illegal, obviously, but it’ll give us time to think about it.”

“But in the meantime, no screwing around,” Augustin settles back in his seat. “I’m serious, Parson. We’re going to be gentlemen about this. A gentleman, by the way, is someone who abides by a code of honour-”

“Hey, fuck you.” Kent says, but it’s not very heated. “We’ll be gentlemen, play as we would otherwise, no sabotage or puck-hoggery-”

“That's not a word, but whatever.”

“First to seventy points, without meddling or interference, gets something to-be-determined-”

“-a boon,” Augustin offers.

“-a boon from the winner.” Kent concurs. “May the best man win.”

“He will.” Augustin says smugly, and Kent almost crashes into his apartment’s curb when he whips his head around to glare.

“Don’t act like you’re a genius, I fucking handed that to you.”

They pull into Kent’s designated parking spot, and Kent shuts the car off, holding out a hand. Augustin reaches out and shakes it. He swallows jaggedly at the sensation of heat radiating off of Kent’s skin, and releases him quickly, unbuckling his seatbelt and jumping out of the car.

He should be more composed than this, even after a shit second period and that rat Ron Arsineaux managing to hit him where it hurts, but something about Kent figuring him out so quickly is crawling under his skin like a stray ant. He looks over at Kent as they ride the elevator up: short, blond, pretty, easy to underestimate. That was the guy’s whole schtick back in the Q, and now here Augustin is, about to fall for it almost a decade later. It was a tactical blunder, to think that the frat-boy attitude meant that Kent wasn’t still smart as a whip. He’s not making that mistake again.

“What?” Kent asks rudely.

“Does your hair ever lie flat?” Augustin flicks one of the blond antennae standing up from Kent’s head. “It’s atrocious.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Kent grumbles, attempting to flatten the cowlicks and largely failing, “Like your hair’s any better.”

They are both fully aware that it is, by a significant margin. Thanks to the headband and excellent genetics, Augustin doesn’t get helmet hair.

Kent volunteers to make them both dinner, but “makes” is a strong word for what that actually constitutes considering that his fridge has three apples, about two-dozen protein shakes, and a hunk of cheese in it.

“There’s this company Chad recommends,” he explains as he takes two plastic containers out of his massive freezer. “They deliver frozen meals. I can’t cook for shit.”

“That’s so depressing,” Augustin says from the couch as Kent dumps two frozen hunks of pasta and chicken into a baking dish and shoves it into the oven before it’s even done preheating. His stomach growls. All he wants right now is a massive bowl of ragout de boulettes, or anything else that doesn’t taste like freezer burn, but beggars can’t be choosers. They can, however, be reasonably annoying. “You can’t cook? Are you twelve?”

“If you want to cook, feel free,” Kent grouses as he collapses onto the opposite end of the couch, and his scowl deepens when his cat leaps onto Augustin’s lap and curls in on herself. Augustin pets her tiny head idly as he scrolls on his phone. He’s pretty sure that like most cats, Kit only likes him because he doesn’t pay much attention to her. He can tell it drives Kent nuts.

Kit moseys up his chest and starts playing with Augustin’s lucky tie. Kent whips out his phone, and snaps a picture before Augustin can cover his face with a hand. “You’re going on Kit’s Instagram.”

“Ugh,” Augustin mutters dismally. Parson’s fucking cat has more followers than him, which is fine. What isn’t fine is that the overexposed picture Kent took makes him look whiter than a ghost, and the fact that his sister comments on it forty-seven seconds after it gets posted.

“What’s a…bon-home de nedge?” Kent asks, with horrible pronunciation. He grins, “That’s a snowman, right?”

“No,” Augustin says with dignity he doesn’t rightfully possess, and goes to change, Kit leaping out of his lap.

He’s got three outfit choices at maximum, with the rest of his clothes boxed up in Montreal awaiting his new address. He should have them sent to Kent’s apartment, but he’s not sure how long he’ll be here. There’s no use in taking them out of storage for eight measly months or less. Maybe he’ll just send them back to the Baie, and join them when no one signs him for next season.

What a glamorous life he lives.

Eventually, he defaults to a black button-down with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of thin grey trousers, because he now lives in the devil’s armpit and it’s an ungodly twenty-three degrees in October.

When he emerges from his room, for a second he thinks Kent might be checking him out, until he looks down at himself and realizes that he’s just covered in fine grey cat hair. God, he needs to get laid tonight, or soon he’s going to start hallucinating.

“There’s a lint roller in the cupboard,” Kent says, and turns back to his phone.

Augustin lint-rolls himself, they eat the ridiculous frozen pasta, and then Augustin steals the car keys and holds them out of reach until Kent spits out a smattering of curses and lets Augustin drive them to a bar that the Aces frequent. It’s allegedly an old mafia haunt, low-ceilinged and wood-panelled, decorated with honest-to-God wooden barrels at odds with the neon lights and thumping techno. Like everything else in Vegas, it’s an overstimulating, frenetic mess with an inexplicable allure.

There’s a long table in the front that’s already populated by a bunch of Aces, who have pitchers of beer and rocks glasses of hard liquor in front of them. Swoops waves them over to the far side of the table.

“Sup, losers,” he says as they slide into the booth. Augustin forces Kent to sit on the inside by pretending to take a long time fiddling with his sleeves, perching at the edge of the booth once everyone else is settled. He feels like some sort of exotic animal on display, ogled by passersby analyzing his every move. His palms are starting to sweat, and they skid over the knees of his pants.

“Here,” Troy pushes a glass of clear liquid towards him. “Water.”

“Thanks,” Augustin says, looking around for a waiter. What few there are are preoccupied at the bar or taking orders from other tables, and they look like they won’t be around for a while. He tries to swallow, but his throat is dry. Water would help with that. He can’t make himself reach for the glass.

It’s stupid. This is Jeffrey Troy, who coaches his niece’s team in Toronto during the off-season and regularly works with various Vegas charities supporting addicts. He’s about as sweet and wholesome as an NHL player gets, and Augustin knows that. He knows him. It’s just a fucking glass of water, it’s just an alternate captain looking out for his teammate. Augustin knows this.

He gets up and goes to the bar, “Can I get a sparkling water, please?”

“Are you with the Aces?”

“No.”

The bartender isn’t paid to ask questions, and he doesn’t seem to give a shit anyways. “What’s the name for the tab?”

“Max.”

He doesn’t even fucking like sparkling water, but he watches the bartender pour it from the little green bottle into the cup, and carries it back to the table the long way. They’re doing a round of shots when he returns, and Augustin sees Kent toss his shot of tequila over his shoulder into the potted plant behind him and set the glass down with a very convincing wince.

“You forgot to suck the lime,” he says as he sits down. Kent rolls his eyes and shoves a wedge of lime into his mouth.

“I wouldn’t think you knew how to take a shot, Prohibition,” he mumbles around the rind. Augustin smacks him around the head hard enough to launch the green strip across the table and into the communal bowl of peanuts, prompting Smitty to laugh hard enough that beer goes up his nose.

“Fucking gross!”

The conversations range drastically, and contrary to popular belief, Augustin likes to listen more than talk even though he can’t shut up on the ice. He’s still learning everyone’s names, their mannerisms, the little things that make them tick like clocks. A few of the younger guys have brought their girlfriends, and he ends up talking to Makela’s girlfriend Lena about her masters program for a little while. She’s a smart woman, if a bit overly enthusiastic.

“There’s this great girl in my ethics class,” she says purposefully, “She grew up here, if you’re ever looking for someone to show you around.”

“Don’t take her up on it,” Makela says, looping an arm around her shoulders, “She’s a total puck bunny.”

Lena swats his arm, “Babe, she is not!”

“She’s not? Remember my birthday party last year, where she basically threw herself at Parson?”

“She didn’t throw herself at me,” Kent says magnanimously, “Gently tossed, maybe. She was very nice, though, so I wouldn’t inflict Berenger on her.”

“It’s okay,” Augustin says, taking a sip of his drink and grimacing at the bubbles. “I appreciate it, but I don’t exactly have trouble getting dates.”

A few of the younger Aces go ‘oooh’ on cue, and Kent rolls his eyes so tremendously that Augustin’s shocked they don’t fall out of his head.

“Bull,” Troy points damningly at him, “I call bull. I saw how awkward you were in Sochi with that German figure skater. She threw water in your face.”

“She did?” Kent says too happily. Augustin strategically omits that they’d been arguing heatedly about German vs. French cinema.

“Please, one occasion doesn’t define me. I bet I could get more girls than most of you, and definitely you, Troy,” he says, leaning back against the wall as casually as he can. It’s a strange line to walk: how far can he push the truth before it becomes a lie, and how much can he lie before he feels like he’s become a different person? A person he doesn’t recognize in the mirror.

Here’s how it works in his world: Jack Zimmermann had the balls to come out to the most homophobic fanbase in sports, but he’s got the luxury of a nice civilian boyfriend who understands the league, a dad who’s hockey royalty, and a solid contract to back him up. Even if Providence had abandoned him after his stunt, he’d find a place in the European league, or coaching university hockey. Despite that safety net, he still gets shit from every angle: harder hits on the ice, more criticism from pundits, more accusations of softness and weakness.

Augustin is on his fifth team in seven years, and his future is bleak even without a gay scandal. If he comes out, there’s no question. His career would be over.

Troy splutters some more about how he just broke up with his last girlfriend eight months ago, and the conversation blissfully drifts away from Augustin’s love life or lack thereof. They needle the easy target of Kent’s revolving door of potential romantic interests some more, who laughs it off as he usually does when he’s asked about who he’s dating by the media and magazines.

“We just hung out,” he says about a model he was photographed with just before the season started. Smitty and Linsky boo loudly. Someone at the other end of the table throws a balled-up napkin that bounces off of Kent’s forehead.

“Hung out or made out?” Smitty retorts, because he’s drunk and nineteen, so he still says things like ‘made out.’ Kent jumps onto that, chirping Smitty good-naturedly until the rookie buries his face in his hands to escape the heckling, shoulders shaking with laughter.

Although it might just be the light, there’s a strange tightness in Kent’s eyes that Augustin quietly files away with his other observations.

The lights go down and the music really starts pounding around ten. The Aces slowly start to disperse onto the dance floor, to dance with their girlfriends or prospective hookups under the cover of darkness. Augustin expects Kent to join them, but he stays where he’s arguing with Scraps and Cross—both of whom are married and content to sit and make fun of the younger Aces—about the merits of black vs. white stick tape. Nobody notices Augustin slipping away.

The other side of the huge bar is another room entirely, this one darker and smokier than the first. Augustin can barely see through the crush of bodies as he makes his way towards a second bar. Something pops and bubbles in his stomach. It’s risky to pick someone up at such a well-known Aces haunt, but he’s not exactly a well-known Ace yet. Besides, he was pretty sure he saw a few actors much more famous than him in the other room, and no one batted an eye.

What if they catch you? A voice that sounds like his younger self asks nervously. What if they find out? They hated me, and they didn’t even know. What do you think they would do if they did?

He almost turns around to return to their table, and barely stops himself at the last moment. If not now, when? When he’s retired and washed up and no one remembers who he is? When he’s assistant coaching a Division 3 college team, or in university for the first time at thirty-five years old, or at home in Baie-Comeau driving the Zamboni for the Drakkar home games and the local minor hockey teams, looking wistfully at the Memorial Cup banners in the rafters and thinking of days gone by?

Fuck it. He has to live somehow, even if it's in shameful dark hookups where all he does is lie with every other breath.

He goes to the other bar, which is smaller and tucked away in the corner, and orders a still water. He may have lived like a nun, but he’s not one. He knows how to stand to accentuate what he has, what other men find attractive, and he knows when someone is unabashedly looking, like the man a few stools away who can’t stop sneaking glances.

“Do you always stare at strangers?” He asks, leaning against the bar as he waits for his glass. The man grins at him, white teeth flashing, and maneuvers expertly to crowd up against Augustin’s body. He’s a couple years younger and markedly shorter, hair brushing Augustin’s chin, and in the packed room, there’s only so much space. Augustin can feel heat through his clothes and clamps down on a shudder.

“Only ones that look like you.” It’s a cheesy line, and the man’s voice is slurring slightly as he speaks below the pounding techno pouring out of the speakers surrounding them, but it’s a bar in Vegas. There have to be allowances.

Augustin grins in a way he knows is sharp, “What a welcome to the city. Are you from here?”

“I’m visiting,” the man says. He’s European from his accent, and so Augustin hazards a guess.

“Swiss or French?” he asks in French, and the man’s pupils expand. He grins lasciviously.

“French. From Lyon,” he says, his hand coming to rest on Augustin’s bare forearm, just above the antique watch Angelique got him for his eighteenth birthday, “ You have a good ear. I’m Theo. And you are?”

“Visiting too,” Augustin lies smoothly, letting a smile just barely trickle onto his face. “From Bordeaux. I’m Maxence.”

Theo shakes his hand when he offers it, a knowing look in his eye. He’s a good-looking man by any metric, but far outside Augustin’s usual type: his hazel hair verges on dirty-blond rather than being dark, and his face is clean-shaven, but he’s got a very thin ring of dove-grey around his pupils, and Augustin’s really not in any position to be particularly picky.

They talk for about five more minutes about football, which Augustin almost slips up and calls soccer more than once, before Theo mentions that he’s staying at a nearby motel. Augustin pays both their tabs and tells him to call a cab to the bar’s back door.

Unfortunately, he has to find Kent first, who’s still sitting at their table watching Troy try and fail to flirt with a girl who is, in all respects, so far out of his league that she might as well be on Pluto. He’s nursing a rocks glass filled with clear liquid and one of those massive cubes of ice. Augustin’s stomach drops.

“I thought you weren’t drinking,” he says, leaning in to speak in Kent’s ear. The music is blaring so loud that he can barely hear his own voice, and if he has to abandon a hookup because Kent decided to get wasted, he’s going to strangle his captain with his bare hands. It wouldn't be the first time he's felt the urge.

Kent raises his glass, and his voice is loud but clear and steady, “I’m not, it’s just seltzer and lime. What’s up?”

“Here,” he says, and hands Kent the keys to his car. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

Kent takes the keys, looking around the bar. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

Augustin notes a weird trepidation in his voice, but right now he’s too wired to care whether or not Kent Parson, who hasn’t had a girlfriend for more than a month at a time, thinks he’s a player or a manwhore. He couldn’t care less if Parson thought he had hired a prostitute. “Why, you wanna join us?”

As heterosexual hockey players typically do, Kent chokes on his drink at the mere idea of having sex with another man, and shoves a hand into Augustin’s bicep almost hard enough to bruise, “Get the fuck outta here.”

Augustin ruffles his hair so that it resembles a tumbleweed, and strolls as casually as he can out of the bar’s back door. There’s a cab waiting there, and Theo, smoking a cigarette.

“About time,” he says, putting out the stub and flicking it into a nearby ashtray. Augustin does a quick double-take, but there’s no one else in this creepy back-alley, and the taxi driver has certainly seen weirder shit in his time. Still, Augustin resists Theo’s attempts to kiss him until they’re inside the cheap motel room and the door is safely locked.

It’s good enough: sloppy and slightly awkward, but not half-bad and certainly not anything to be upset about. It feels real, human, the way their noses awkwardly bump together once or twice, and shirt buttons get caught on themselves. Theo gets a little annoyed when Augustin won’t let him leave any marks, but it turns out that he’s an easily mollified man once Augustin has his clothes off.

“Are you an athlete?” he asks breathlessly, and Augustin surfaces for air to grin down at him.

“Rock climbing. It’s good for your core.”

Theo laughs at that and pushes him gently back down with a hand woven through his hair.

They go one round and then laze under the covers for about an hour watching late-night television and eating snacks from the nearby vending machine.

“Are you in town long?” Augustin asks, shaking Fritos crumbs into his hand. Theo shakes his head and throws a gummy peach up into the air for Augustin to catch in his mouth.

“I leave tomorrow night for L.A. for a few days, and then I’m going home.”

“Damn. What a shame.”

Theo props himself up on an elbow. “If you’re ever in Lyon…”

Augustin leans in to kiss him, and relishes the feeling of lips moving slowly against his own, the flavour of sour candy lingering as he draws back. “I’ll leave you my number.”

They go once more, and Theo falls asleep after, sprawled out on the bed. Augustin knows he should leave now: he’s not particularly attached to this Frenchman he just met, and he doesn’t plan to be. But it’s quiet in this motel room, and for a moment, he doesn’t have to worry about anything. Not hockey, not trades, not whether Theo will go to ESPN tomorrow and tell the NHL about his sordid homosexual tryst, because when he carefully brought up other sports during their soccer conversation, Theo had dismissively said that no other sport mattered to him.

“I don’t even watch the Winter Olympics.”

And bless the vapid self-absorption of Los Angeles, because they don’t play anything other than Kings games down there, and the Aces don’t play the Kings for two weeks.

He gets up after ten minutes and pulls his clothes back on, quietly buckling his belt and buttoning his shirt, checking his wallet carefully to make sure everything is still in there. Theo doesn’t move, not even when Augustin carefully drapes a blanket over his naked form. He scrawls the phone number of a gas station in Bordeaux on the motel stationary and makes sure the door is firmly closed when he leaves.

He walks about a mile to a fast food place with a glowing neon sign and calls a cab from there. It’s nearly four in the morning when he gets back to Kent’s apartment, but Mike the doorman is in the lobby, reading a novel with his feet kicked up on the desk.

“Night shift?” Augustin asks. Mike shakes his head, jaw working a piece of gum.

“Harriet’s gotta go to college somehow,” he says, flipping a page of his book. “That was a hell of a game this afternoon. Harriet couldn’t stop screaming her head off. She’s pestering me to bring her to work so she can meet you.”

“Let me know next time she has a free evening and you have a day off,” Augustin replies, shuffling through his pockets for the electronic fob that allows him to use the elevator. “I’ll get you guys tickets.”

“Are you trying to one-up Kent or bribe me into silence about your drunken debauchery?”

Augustin must look more disheveled than he thought. “It’s out of the goodness of my Canadian heart. And also both those other things.”

Mike shakes his head as Augustin makes his way towards the elevator, “God help me when my kid gets to your age.”

“I’m sure my mother shares that sentiment.”

The apartment is silent when Augustin creeps in, except for the insistent meowing of Kit as he closes the door with a gentle snick and locks it. She twines herself around his ankles as he struggles to kick off his loafers, and eventually he just picks her up so that he can waddle to his room without tripping.

She scampers off to Kent’s room when he sets her down, and he inadvertently follows her movement with his eyes through the open master bedroom door, resting a hand on the doorframe of his room.

Kent’s asleep in his bed, mouth parted slightly. His face is lined with moonlight, gleaming silver off the length of his neck and making his hair seem white. He looks young and untroubled, far more relaxed than Augustin’s ever seen him while he was awake, jaw unclenched and forehead unfurrowed. He smiles gently in his sleep when Kit wriggles under his arm.

Augustin yanks his gaze away, face burning. Ducking into his room, he quickly shuts the door and presses his back against it, feeling the dig of wood against his spine. It’s so late that it’s verging on early, and he’s been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. A brief lapse in sanity is nothing more than that, brief and all.

He quickly strips down and pulls one of the old, worn Habs t-shirts he stole from his dad over his head. He didn’t buy this one: it’s probably older than him. He hasn’t sent his parents any merchandise since he was traded from the Aeros, but his father’s always been a die-hard Canadiens fan, so he had bought a jersey with his son’s name on it the week they’d been released. Angelique posted a picture of him wearing it on her Instagram: Berenger, 24.

When your little brother steals your number again, she had captioned the photo. He’s never seen his father smile so wide.

His dad still hasn’t called since the trade was announced. His mom texted to console him, so they must both know, but his father hasn’t texted or called at all. Augustin supposes, as he falls asleep alone in a bed that’s not his own, in a shirt that’s not his own, that even a father’s love and pride can only extend so far.

Notes:

kent: how the hell you spell showfur
augustin (french): chauffeur
kent: ooh fancy pants rich mcgee over here, fuck you

 

For reference, the Drakkar are the irl QJMHL team for Baie-Comeau, i'm not just making up names. controversial opinion, the Q has better team names than any other league including the NHL.

Chapter 5

Summary:

in which Kent plays it cool, reminisces, and pokes his nose into something that is absolutely none of his fucking business

Augustin can never know, but Kent’s been watching clips from his first season with the Aeros late at night.

It was really just last night, after he got home from the bar while Augustin was busy hooking up with some tourist in her hotel room. The words why, you wanna join us rang around his head like a carousel. Kent’s nowhere near alone in noticing that Augustin is exactly his type—elegant, tall, dark-haired, smarter than God and hell in a handbasket—and if he was any younger or more stupid than he is right now, he might have leapt at the opportunity. Even if it meant sleeping with a woman at the same time and pretending it was her that he wanted more.

But now he’s old and wise and other boring shit, so he left the bar once he had bundled the drunkards into cabs, and ran the dishwasher, and got ready for bed at a reasonable hour. While Augustin Berenger enjoyed his second night in Vegas to its fullest extent, Kent petted his cat and looked at highlight reels.

Their goals looked mildly worse from the air, simply because the cameras don’t have the benefit of hearts and souls along with eyes. Kent watched the game highlights twice, noting down positions and improvements on the back of a receipt for cat-food and toilet paper.

Even after that, he still couldn’t sleep, so he searched augustin berenger aeros 2010.

It was like watching a different person. Kent remembers this Augustin faintly, but only in thin, hazy snippets, nothing as vivid as preserved on the Aeros and NHL social media. He saw it in glimpses on the ice today, almost a lifetime ago, but only in short bursts. There’s no world in which a twenty-five year old hockey player would ever be as composed and controlled as Augustin is now without having experienced something.

The more clips he watched, the more desperately he wanted to know what that something was. It was like when he was a kid, and took apart toys and pieces of machinery to see how they worked on the inside. Smoke alarms, microwaves, a Walkman he picked up from a garage sale. The problem he’d had—and still has—wasn’t discovering how they worked. It was putting them back together afterwards.

This younger Augustin had the arrogance, the fancy puckwork and calculated focus, but he was also a showoff and not afraid to get his hands dirty, and his chirps were juvenile and feisty instead of narrow and biting. He had dimpled cheeks and smiled easily, ribbing his teammates who laughed and scrubbed up his shorter dark hair. He was just like any other eighteen-year-old prospect, with charisma turned up to the maximum setting; a stark, almost implausible contrast to his cold, dark demeanor now.

“He’s a really great kid,” went an October 2010 interview with the Aeros alternate captain at the time, Tim Goldman. They’d cut in footage of younger Augustin fooling around in practice to the sound of the voiceover, flipping pucks around with a shit-eating grin and playfully bumping into his teammates. “Funny, smart, humble, just a great addition to the locker room. He makes everyone laugh, you know? Obviously we hope he sticks around, I can see myself playing with him for a while.”

There was no jealousy, no animosity, but in an interview not two months later, while Augustin was out for a few games with an upper-body injury in early December, Goldman visibly sneered at the mention of Augustin’s name. The Aeros captain, Andrei Valenksy, refused to answer a question about him, and the veteran core clammed up in postgame interviews, sorrowfully blaming Augustin’s increasingly poor performance on youth and inexperience rather than being hung out to dry by his teammates.

Kent slammed his laptop shut after the sixth postgame interview where a bunch of Aeros piled onto Augustin’s disappointing debut season with varying degrees of severity and malice, feeling a familiar nausea rise in the back of his throat. He’d never thought about his debut season as lucky, not with Jack’s hospitalization and subsequent silence, not with the sudden, unending media pressure. But looking back, he had Shetty, Hairball, and Cross to lean on and they never said or even suggested anything nearly as bad as what the Aeros core gladly volunteered to the press.

Kent wasn’t exactly an easy rookie in his first year, not like Augustin appeared to be. He drank far more than he should have, he chirped guys twice his size to draw cheap penalties, snapped and snarled at his own teammates at practice, and went out to bars and clubs alone despite being underage. He was generally a massive dick to everyone, until Shetty had sat him down one day and said sternly to him:

“I know you’ve got a lot of shit going on in your life that you won’t talk about, but we’re your fucking team. We have your fucking back no matter how much of a jackass you’re being, so quit trying to push us away. We’re not leaving you alone. So would you knock it off?”

With the benefit of hindsight and a few years of captaincy under his belt, Kent tried to think about what a rookie, eighteen and fresh from the draft, could possibly do to be abandoned like that if his own antics were just minor annoyances, easily overcome. Even as he fell asleep, he couldn’t think of a goddamn thing.

He texts Bad Bob about it the next morning, trying to be casual and making sure he’s using full sentences and proper capitalization. Did you ever hear about what happened with Augustin Berenger and the Aeros?

Bob’s always been good about texting Kent back, even during the times when all he got from Jack was radio silence. He gets a reply about an hour later, while he’s making Kit’s breakfast and his morning coffee, and hoping he doesn’t mix the two up again.

Can’t say that I have, but I can ask around. I do know that the Habs were having trouble integrating him. He was very resistant to participating in team events.

Kent sneaks a look at the front door, as if Augustin might burst in at any moment, and quickly replies, Thanks. How’s Alicia?

The text back is almost instant: Alicia sends her love. Next time you’re in town, come for dinner.

With nothing else to do since he’s already packed for their flight today, he stares at his phone and wonders how much he actually wants to know. It’s in the past, and he’s not stupid enough to think that Augustin’s cool with Kent poking around in his business. Their wager doesn’t extend off-ice, but if Augustin ever found out, any substantial wisp of chemistry and team play would be gone.

Listen, Kent’s got hamartias out his ass. He learned that word from his sister: a fatal flaw, an irreconcilable trait that would ultimately bring about his downfall. Some might say pride, others would say lack of foresight, others still selfishness. That’s all true, but Kent’s very aware that his most fatal flaw is that he can’t help but fix a problem when he sees it, and he can’t help but solve a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved.

After a few minutes of itchy silence, he finds Jack’s number and hits ‘call.’ There’s something to be said about desperate times.

It’s a reasonable hour on the East Coast, so Jack picks up after a few rings.

“Hey Zimms,” Kent says, voice miraculously level, and dries his sweaty hands on the dishtowel.

“Hey Kent,” Jack says in bemusement, and the sound of a buzzsaw in the background fades away. “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kent swallows a lump down, but it doesn’t disappear completely. He’s been trying his best to make his calls to Jack casual, few, and very far-between. He doesn’t want to fuck anything else up, but there’s an almost Pavlovian response to Jack’s voice that makes his heart hammer and limbs long for closeness. Not embraces anymore, thank God, but high-fives and fist-bumps and ruffled hair. “Yeah, I, uh…you’ve got Dustin Snow on your team, he was drafted by the Aeros in ‘08, right? Do you remember what year he was traded?”

“Hold on,” Jack says, “Let me…”

There’s a rustle and muffled shouting, a faded response. The edge of the kitchen counter digs into Kent’s spine as he waits. Jack’s voice returns shortly.

“He only played a few games for the Aeros in the preseason, then the Falcs picked him up in the expansion draft. Why?” Jack makes an understanding noise immediately after he asks the question, “This is about Berenger.”

“Don’t you ever wonder what the hell happened?” Kent asks, bracing his elbows against the marble countertop. He picks up his coffee, which flows over his tongue with a texture like wet sand. “Watching it unfold, seeing what happened to him, and wondering why?”

“I was a bit preoccupied,” Jack says dryly. As glad as Kent is that Jack feels he can make jokes about it nowadays, he just can’t jump on board. After all, Jack was unconscious the whole time. Kent had to see it all: the tubes, the defibrillators, the scrubs, and the colour of the mushy half-dissolved pills on the white tiled floor of the bathroom. Jack must realize from the extended silence, because he swears under his breath.

“Shit, sorry, Kenny. I didn’t think-”

“Nah, man, it’s all good,” Kent says, smoothing his hair back as he stretches out his spine and grabs his coffee off the counter. It’s not “all good,” but what else is he supposed to say? I still have nightmares. I still think about what could have happened if I hadn’t driven you insane. I miss you in a way I can’t describe.

“To answer your question, I did. But sometimes the past should stay where it is.” Jack says, and if that isn’t a kick in the dick, what is? Jack is a different person now. He lives the life of a stranger. The phone calls are helpful, in that sense: Kent can pretend the person on the other end of the line doesn’t wear the face of the best friend he doesn’t know anymore.

“How’s the wedding planning going?” He asks, knowing full well that he’s not going to be part of it. In the times before and after he could reasonably wish to be the one at the altar, he imagined he would have been Jack’s best man, or at least a groomsman. Now, he’ll be lucky to sit at the slush table, if Bittle even lets Alicia invite him. Jack hums.

“My mom’s all over it, I had to talk her down from getting those home magazines involved. I was trying to convince Bit- Eric that it’ll be easier for him if he doesn’t bake the cake himself, and he ripped me a new one.”

“Man, even I know that’s like trying to get a shark not to swim in the ocean.”

“Closest I’ve ever been to sleeping on the couch.” Jack jokes, and Kent finds it in himself to laugh. He has to laugh, because if he thinks too hard about how stilted their conversations are these days, he’ll throw up.

“Did you-”

The guest bedroom slams open and a dark-haired Quebecois menace pokes his head out like the goddamn second coming of the Babadook. “Parson, would you shut the fuck up about fucking weddings? I have a half-hour before my alarm goes off.”

Kent feels his heart shoot out his ass so fast that it breaks the sound barrier.

“Ah!” he shrieks, spilling his coffee everywhere, including on himself and the corner of his living room rug. Augustin just blinks at him blearily.

“It’s eight in the morning, and you’re as loud as a fucking bullhorn,” he grumbles sleepily, wearing just tight boxer briefs and a loose, worn Habs t-shirt rucked up on one side and inadvertently exposing a strip of pale skin. Kent suddenly feels very faint. He chooses to blame it on the fact that Augustin nearly gave him a heart attack.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

“Kenny?” Jack asks, voice growing concerned, “Is everything okay?”

“When the hell did you get back?” Kent whisper-shouts at Augustin, who yawns. He still has residual eyeliner smudged around his eyes, and leans his head woozily against the doorframe like it's the only thing holding him upright. For a guy who doesn’t drink, he looks remarkably hungover.

“Uh…four? I told you I’d be back in the morning. You were asleep. What the hell are you yelling about?”

He doesn’t seem to have caught the first half of Kent’s conversation, which is a fucking relief. If he had, Kent has no doubt he’d have been thrown out the window by now, or stabbed with a kitchen knife. He covers the phone speaker. “I’m on the phone.”

“With who? Who’s getting married?”

“Zimms.”

“Jack Zimmermann, comment va ton petit blond?” Augustin says loudly enough that the hand covering the speaker means nothing, a devilish grin on his face. Kent can hear Jack sighing on the other end of the line.

“Some people never change, eh?”

“I’ll see you around, Zimms,” Kent says hastily, “Tell Bittle I say hello and congrats on his new gig.”

“Yeah, see you in a couple weeks, Kenny.” Jack’s voice is dubious. “Good luck.”

You’re going to need it is unspoken.

“Make me coffee,” Augustin demands, and then shuts the bedroom door. Kent can hear the shower running a moment later, and sighs, staring down at Kit.

“I have to do everything in this goddamn house.”

They’re flying to the lower East Coast for a roadie this afternoon: Canes, Caps, Panthers, and Lightning, back to back. It’s the first road trip of the season, and Kent can’t help but worry about it, as he does with all things. There’s a world of difference between beating the Ducks at home after a three-day hiatus, and taking their newly trained show pony on the road for four away games in six days. His peace with Augustin is tenuous enough as is: less of a treaty, more of a temporary armistice.

“Are you packed?” he asks Augustin when he emerges towelling off his hair and comically dressed in black dress pants and the grey Habs t-shirt. Kent does not mean to look, but if he happens to notice that Augustin doesn’t have any marks on his skin, well then he’s just observant.

“Ready when you are,” Augustin says, taking a seat at the kitchen island and sipping the coffee Kent generously made for him. Kent stares at him for a few moments: he somehow looks both more tense and more relaxed than he had before last night. Kent can reasonably chalk it up to an overexposure to Vegas, but he’s not sure that’s it.

“Do I have something on my face?” Augustin asks good-naturedly, or at least not with any malice, the cup hovering near his lips. He’s almost smiling. Kent’s faintness still hasn’t faded, which is what he’s going to blame for what he says next.

“You know,” he begins, struggling to find the words. Somehow, this is much easier to tell a rookie than Augustin. At least a rookie respects his authority as captain. “Legal can prepare NDAs for anyone you…hook up with.”

He knows because he’d made a couple of girls sign them when he was younger: not to hook up, but when he’d asked them to come to events, disguising it as part of standard protocol. Now, if anyone asks, they can just laugh and coyly say “I can’t say anything,” which makes it sound as if there’s something to be said. He’d been a paranoid kid, okay? Most of the younger Aces ignore his advice anyways because they don’t need it and they’re not old enough yet to be offended by it. He just feels obligated to offer.

Augustin's head whips up, dark eyes wide and sharp as daggers, “What the fuck?”

Kent immediately hits the backpedal. “Man, I’m just saying, it’s an option.”

“Why would I need an NDA?” Augustin asks cuttingly, rising from his stool, “You know what, Parson? Just because I live with you doesn’t mean I need you to take care of me. Keep your fucking nose out of my private life. I have to finish changing.”

The drive to the airport is just as awkward as the one yesterday morning. Kent’s starting to wonder if putting his foot in his mouth this often is nutritionist-approved or not, and the breakfast sandwiches they stop to get certainly aren’t. Somehow, he thinks Chad wouldn’t be amused if he asked.

He gets a phone call as they get out of the car with their luggage, and he motions Augustin to go ahead, foolishly thinking that it’s Jack calling back or something. When he picks up, though, it’s the Aces GM, Hollis St. Martin.

Hollis, bless his heart, is the bluntest man alive. He doesn’t really do pleasantries. He doesn’t really do ‘pleasant.’ “Parson, glad I caught you. We picked up a new depth center from Nashville, Luka Rubenis.”

Luka Rubenis has been tearing up the AHL for the last couple of seasons, so he won’t have come cheap. Kent’s heart drops. “What’d we give?”

“A couple guys from the farm team and a third.” Hollis says, and he breathes a sigh of relief. If he’d had to tell one of the guys sitting on the plane to get off, he doesn’t know what he would have done. “He’ll be meeting the team in Raleigh before the game tomorrow, but that means we’re short of a hotel room for the rest of the trip.”

“He can have mine,” Kent volunteers, because he’s not a moron, and Hollis isn’t subtle. “I’ll room with Troy or something.”

“Great. Thanks, Parson. Good luck in Carolina.”

By the time he gets on the plane, the boys are buzzing about the trade as it pops up on their phones. Kent stops by one of the few tables on the plane, where Swoops, Scraps, Cross and Cross’ D-partner Harley are playing what looks like a blend of pinochle, five-card draw, and spoons.

“Hey, Swoops, I’m gonna need to room with you to make room for the new center,” he says, leaning over the table. “He’s coming in tomorrow morning for the roadie.”

“I'm rooming with Scraps this time around,” Swoops says apologetically, “So unless you want to share a bed-”

“Nevermind.” Kent tries to think about who else might have a room to themselves. “Harley?”

“No,” Harley grunts, his Norwegian accent thick as he focuses on his cards, “Room with Cross.”

“He snores,” Cross whispers. “So I’ll swap with you- ow!”

“Play card, asshole- faen ta deg!”

“Gus might have one,” Swoops says purposefully as Cross scrapes in his winnings, although it’s entirely likely that he just wants to get rid of Kent so he doesn’t have to spend the whole flight talking about strategy. Kent usually sits with Shetty on flights, but there’s no Shetty anymore, so he’ll probably have to keep himself company with his laptop and highlight reels.

He looks around and spots Augustin in the back corner, sitting on the aisle with an empty window seat next to him. His dark head doesn’t rise from looking at his own laptop as Kent comes over.

“Do you have a room to yourself?”

“I might,” Augustin says, still not looking. He’s watching Canes highlights, the red and black zipping around his screen as he types in another window. There are blue-light glasses with thin wire frames perched on his aquiline nose, and Kent has to look everywhere but directly at them if he’s going to exercise proper authority.

“I need to room with you if you do.”

Augustin doesn’t answer or look up, but his lips purse tightly.

“Everybody take your seats please,” the flight attendant says from the front of the plane. Kent, trapped in the aisle by Augustin’s refusal to abide by the rules of polite society, kicks one shiny leather loafer.

“According to NHLPA guidelines,” Augustin drones, “A player is not obligated to-”

“Gus, seriously,” Kent snaps, “It’s either me or the new kid.”

“I could-”

“He’s twenty-one and fresh out of Nashville. There’s a non-zero chance that he has a catfish in his suitcase, so unless you plan on frying up a po boy in the hotel kitchenette-”

Augustin finally looks up at him, eyes tightening. “Fine. But if you snore, I’m smothering you in your sleep.”

He takes his bag off the window seat and stands up. Kent thinks that he’s going to move, a jab about Augustin’s pettiness primed and ready, but he just stands there looking at Kent until he gets the hint.

Kent slides into the vacated seat, and Augustin tucks his coat and laptop bag in the overhead compartment before sitting with a sigh and squeak of leather. The plane roars to life, and Kent tries to distract himself with his phone, but his palms slip over the screen and Augustin’s shoulder is only an inch away from his.

He thinks about their stupid bet. It's a distraction, unbefitting the captain of a team. Why the hell did he make it? It’s all he’s been thinking about: puzzling Augustin out, beating him, to the point that he didn’t even notice that they were going to trade for another player because he’s so wrapped up in his own shit.

It’s like playing violin as the Titanic sinks, he supposes. He’s watching his team be rebuilt in real-time, and he has to deal with that somehow. This chapter of the How to be an NHL Captain for Dummies handbook (informal, patent pending) is sparse and essentially amounts to “cross yourself and hope for the best.” It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that in the grand scheme of things, he’s still young. He feels old down to his bones, and maybe it’s starting to affect his playing. Maybe he needs this stupid fucking bet to remember why he loves this sport so much, that he lets it take so much from him.

“Here.”

Augustin tilts his computer screen to Kent as the plane takes off, his voice barely audible under the roar of jet engines. He points a long finger at one of the Canes players. “He’s going to drop it back, and that’s going to start a new cycle while the goalie gets screened.”

He hits play, and the Canes do just that, pinning the St. Louis goalie behind a massive body so they can sneak a shot in. Augustin narrates the play as it happens, despite the sound not being on, and pauses multiple times to note positioning. When that clip ends, Augustin switches to another, and then another after that. It’s more thorough than anything Kent’s been given by the people paid to watch these tapes, things that he would have never noticed that become obvious only after Augustin points them out.

“They still do this?” he asks, trying not to be giddy. This is like getting handed exam answers right before the test.

“Tape’s from their season opener.” Augustin replies. “Watch how they break out.”

Kent listens intently as Augustin narrates the play. This is exactly what he wanted: to crack open Augustin’s brain and see the way the wires connect, the way the gears turn and click. He’s never met anyone as analytical as Augustin until now. He notes the most minuscule of patterns and tells with apparent ease: dropped shoulders, lengthened strides, slightly angled stick blades that consistently produce similar results.

It’s not just the Canes, either, with a roster Augustin is more intimately familiar with. They move on to Tampa and Washington after about a half-hour, Augustin pointing out similar observations with only slightly less detail and consistency. Kent’s both terrified by the depth of what Augustin notices and slightly turned on.

He’s always had a weird thing for competence.

There’s a spreadsheet involved with the analysis, with a separate page for each team. Kent notes an Aces page as Augustin scrolls to the Caps’ one to punctuate a point with numbers, but before he can ask to see it, Augustin unbuckles his seatbelt and stands, disappearing into the washroom without a word. He leaves the spreadsheet open on the Caps’ page, so Kent leans across the armrest and scrolls through it. When he reaches the end, he tries to tab to the Panthers’ page next.

His finger slips, and an entirely new window pops up on the screen.

“Shit,” he breathes, trying to tab back to the other document, but then everything seems to go very still and quiet, as if time has stopped around him. This spreadsheet has all the teams listed on it, coloured bars of red, orange, yellow, and green. There’s categories for cap space, summaries of deficits and strengths, analysis of roster depth. One of the columns is titled “potential linemates.”

He shouldn’t look. It’s none of his business.

The page he’s on is incomplete, and labeled ‘LVA.’ Las Vegas Aces. The only two teams in green are Winnipeg with “needs depth forward for defence prospects” in the notes, and Arizona with something similar, only with specific names attached. There are other notes too, but they devolve into numbers and statistical gibberish that Kent can’t unravel this quickly.

He shouldn’t look. It’s none of his business.

He clicks the next tab, titled ‘MTL.’ The categories remain the same, but the teams and their assigned colours change dramatically. At the top, in green, are three teams: Nashville, Florida, and Las Vegas. His blood chills as he reads the notes next to his team’s name:

needs skill winger for Parson, exchange for veteran winger and solid defender. Evgeni Sokolov/Harrison Ballantine and Ethan Cross/Carl Bergman/Marcus Shetland. Goalie depth?

There’s another tab for ‘NYR,’ and one labeled ‘CAR.’ Kent can feel his skin crawl as he reads. Blood roars in his ears, drowning out the jet engines. If he’s reading this damn thing right, and he’s pretty sure he is, Augustin is tracking his potential trades. It’s not casual curiosity, either. The organization and detail borders on obsessiveness, and what’s worse, the prospective trades appear to be mostly accurate.

Forget the fucking rebuild: they never put how to deal with this in the fucking handbook, probably because nobody has ever been as meticulous and equally insane as Augustin Berenger in the history of the world.

There’s one final tab labeled ‘UFA,’ for unrestricted free agency. Kent’s already going to Hell for this, and he can hear Augustin washing his hands, so he opens it quickly. The page doesn’t have a single green bar. There’s three teams in pale yellow, two in orange, including Vegas, and the rest are bright, glaring red.

He hears the lock click and minimizes the window just before Augustin opens the door. He feels hungover somehow, feverish and sick, bile rising in the back of his throat as he slides back in his seat. Augustin sits down like nothing’s wrong, like Kent hasn’t just seen all his most vulnerable parts neatly lined up in spreadsheet cells, clinically analyzed for flaws and features. His glasses are crooked.

“Huh,” Augustin says as he buckles his seatbelt again, “I thought you’d have gone on to the Panthers.”

“Nah,” Kent says, doing a truly remarkable job of keeping his voice from shaking with what is either anger, shock, or some toxic combination of the two. “I’m going to take a nap, okay? Show me the rest tonight.”

“I was going to show this to Smitty tonight at the hotel,” Augustin says, pushing his glasses up his nose. He’s so focused on his numbers that he doesn't even notice Kent losing his mind right next to him. “Guess you’ll have to join us.”

“Great, slumber party,” Kent says hastily, turning his face to the window. “Wake me up when they bring out the snacks.”

He closes his eyes, and tries to ignore the sensation of Augustin typing beside him. He can see the coloured bars imprinted on his eyelids: green, yellow, orange, red. Kent knows all about assigning logic and reason to emotional responses: it’s something he’s notably terrible at. But there’s that saying about having too much of a good thing. The exposed inner workings of Augustin’s brain are equally terrifying and beautiful, and utterly without cause.

Regular people don’t do shit like this. Shit like this happens to people against their will, and it makes them do crazy things. Kent would know better than anyone.

“Quit fucking squirming,” Augustin says in a gentle whisper. His accent is more pronounced than normal today. “You’re going to hit me with one of your knobby fucking elbows.”

Kent squeezes his eyes shut tighter and thinks, dear Jack, with all due respect, your advice was shit.

Notes:

sometimes platonic longing is so much worse than romantic longing. i can survive a breakup. on the other hand, i think if my best friends ever left me like jack left kent i would eat off my own arm or something. nobody's perfect, but i will never forgive tumblr for robbing us (me) of kent parson's healing arc. hopefully the check please renaissance will bring some of that about.

fun quebecois fact: blonde is a term used for girlfriends regardless of hair colour according to my dad, so I thought it would be funny to refer to Bitty as blond because wordplay is fun for me i love linguistics

Chapter 6

Summary:

in which Augustin has an untimely revelation, life is one damn thing after another, and the damn things often overlap

The press desperately wants Augustin to have a problem with the Carolina Hurricanes, and the fact is that he just doesn’t.

There is no bad blood: the Canes signed him to a fair contract, gave him a fair shot despite mediocre chemistry with his linemates, and let him go when it became clear that Augustin just didn’t play their style of hockey. The guys were all reasonably friendly, if rather disinterested and put off by Augustin’s personality, which made it easier to stay on the outskirts and actually get laid regularly. He spent more time in Raleigh than he did with any other team: almost two and a half years.

They even put a graphic of him up on the jumbotron during the warm-ups, where he’s clad in once-familiar red and black as opposed to still-unfamiliar black and silver. He waves his stick for the cheers, which surprisingly outnumber the boos. He tries not to feel too touched about that.

He sees Kent toss a puck to a kid wearing a red and black Berenger jersey during the warmup, earning him a fair few glares from nearby fans. So he launches a shoulder into Kent’s sternum when he turns around, pinning him momentarily against the boards so the fans can smack the glass next to his ear and shout nasty things that are muffled by the barrier.

“Ugh, you’re the worst,” Kent grunts, straightening his helmet as Augustin releases him. He looks up, and Augustin follows his gaze to where the jumbotron replays their interaction. The whole crowd cheers loudly when Kent gets smushed.

“Gotta get you fired up somehow,” he says, because Kent’s been weird since the plane, and Augustin needs him to actually put up a fight if this bet is going to mean anything at all.

Kent pastes on a horrendously fake smirk that cuts jaggedly across his face, “I’m always fired up.”

Their first period gets off to a slow start, and the Canes open the scoring on Scraps, who takes it personally and starts standing on his head. The defencemen get a fire lit under their ass by their coach, and Smitty, who’s got a better memory and attention span than Augustin gave him credit for, quickly adapts to the Canes’ style of play.

He feels the satisfying click of good strategy and natural rhythm setting in place, but there’s a sputtering clank of something amiss in the form of a five-foot-nine skill center who’s not pulling his weight. Late in the first, Augustin gets an assist on a wicked slapshot from Allie, just after Kent goes for a line change, and grins all the way back to the bench.

“Up by two,” he sings, feeling the adrenaline pumping through his veins, cold and watery against the heat of his blood. Kent opens his mouth as if to chirp, but clamps it shut immediately after. Augustin winds up and hits him in the groin for it.

Kent’s dragging his feet all game. He gets a goal, but Augustin gets an assist on that one as well, and ends the night up by three points and being thoroughly booed by the Canes fans as they leave the ice with a win under their belts. He waves at them cheekily, and gets multiple birds flashed at him. So much for hospitality.

They make him do press in the locker room afterwards, and he gives a cookie-cutter answer about playing well with Smitty. Someone asks him, as he foresees becoming a trend, what it’s like to be playing on the same line as Art Ross/Conn Smythe/other-trophy-winner Kent Vincent Parson, number 90, NHL darling.

Augustin looks over at Kent, waits for him to make eye contact, and says: “Well, I think I won this game when it comes to performance. What do you say, Parson?”

“I think you played a great game, Gus,” Kent replies pleasantly, and goes back to untying his skates. Augustin squirts him with his water bottle and Smitty for good measure, but at least Smitty tries to get him back, and has to hastily apologize to a soaking wet ESPN beat reporter.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks Kent that night, once Kent emerges from the shower. Sharing a room isn’t too different from sharing an apartment, except for the noise and the fact that Kent can’t escape to anywhere but the bathroom, and he’s already used that excuse.

In the room next door, they can hear Smitty and Frisk yelling at each other about a video game, German and English rapidly flying back and forth. Kent glares at him as he shrugs a t-shirt on, and even that lacks heat. There’s no chirps, no jabs from the NHL’s most notorious loudmouth. Augustin’s gotten more passionate responses from Kent’s cat.

“Will you at least look over the fucking notes I’m sending you?”

“Sure,” Kent mumbles, and then goes to bed without opening his laptop. Augustin considers it an act of God that Kent isn’t smothered in his sleep.

Their game against the Washington Capitals is more of the same. They win this one too, but Augustin and Smitty have to drag Kent through two periods by his ankles, and he doesn’t wake up until the third, when Augustin takes a swing at someone while he thinks the referee isn’t looking and gets put in the box. Even then, the criticisms Augustin gets on the bench are almost congenial.

They barely eke out an overtime win, and end the game with Augustin up twelve points to Kent’s measly five, the Aces one win closer to a streak, and Kent trapped in his own head.

It’s Tampa that brings Augustin to the end of his rope, because they lose to Tampa.

It’s a brutal game against a very good team, and no amount of foreknowledge on anyone’s part can keep them afloat if they can’t physically counter the Lightning’s strategies. It’s a blowout loss, 4-1, and Troy has to do the postgame interview partly because he scored the only goal and partly because two of the Aces’ starting forwards are clearly about to flip their lids.

Kent and Augustin sit next to each other in the back row of the bus, quarantined by two rows of empty seats from the rest of the team. Troy and Scraps look owlishly over at them every so often, whispering to each other furiously. Probably to make sure Augustin hasn’t killed their franchise player yet. It’s okay. There’s still time.

Hockey is a violent sport, but Augustin’s not a violent man by nature off the ice. Violence is a tool like any other, employed when strategically expedient, and he doesn’t particularly like doing it. Fighting in hockey is seldom a selfishly motivated event; it’s about retribution, honour, and the collective good of the team.

So it’s for the good of the team that when they return to their hotel room, sore and stinking from the loss, Augustin barely waits for the door to close before he’s leveraging Kent’s smaller frame over his shoulder and throwing him onto the bed. Kent lands with a strangled whuff.

“What the hell- OW!”

Augustin hits him on the face with a pillow before he can get up. He can’t actually injure his captain halfway through a road trip at the beginning of the season, even if he really would like to.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Every other word is punctuated by a smack.

“With me?” Kent shoves the pillow off of his face, flushed with anger and unruly blond hair sticking up everywhere. “With me? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m playing good fucking hockey!” Augustin retorts, and Kent dodges his next blow, scrambling off the bed and putting it between the two of them. “You’re asleep at the fucking wheel!”

“You played like shit today!”

“Yeah, well, I’m fucking tired from carrying your fat ass through the Eastern Seaboard.”

“I have a great ass!” Kent retorts, the vain little peacock. He absolutely does, but that’s not important. They all play hockey. He’s not special. “I have one off day-”

“-God, I wish it was just a fucking day-”

“-what the fuck do you want from me?” Kent snarls, “What, do you want me to be meaner to you? Don’t you think that’s a little fucked up?”

“J'm'en calisse! Are you my therapist? I don’t care if you tell Sportsnet that my mere proximity gives you hives. Show the fuck up! To think I shared my fucking spreadsheet with you,” Augustin shouts, and hits him in the face again. This time, Kent lets it happen. He just…stands there and lets the pillow hit him in the face. Augustin feels his heaving chest go still.

There it is again, the coddling look of someone afraid that he’s going to break. It took him years after he told Angelique what happened with the Aeros to convince her to stop looking at him like that, and Kent doesn’t even know. So why the fuck is he looking at Augustin like that, all big green eyes and weepy and concerned?

Unless he already knows. They’re all his friends.

The voice in his head, which is his own but somehow unfamiliar, young and nasty and arrogant, is like a scalpel. It’s useful when it’s not directed at him, when it gets its hands on Augustin’s soft, squishy parts like a seagull cracking a shell, it’s merciless. His eyes narrow at Kent, focusing its ire outside of himself.

“What?”

“What?” Kent echoes, guilt written all over his face. Augustin can feel his gut tilting from side to side, sloshing around as he brandishes the pillow at him.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“Nothing!” Kent doesn’t move as Augustin advances on him, tossing the pillow to the side. He can feel his hands shaking again and flexes them so that it’s less noticeable. He’s been careful about the men, about the press, about his rookie year, but there’s always a slim chance because nothing stays secret forever around here.

“You’re such a shit liar, Parson, I swear-”

There’s a banging on their hotel room door that mercifully stops Augustin from smacking his captain with an open fist this time. They both turn to look.

“Hey!” Troy shouts from the other side of the door, “Would you two stop arguing like a goddamn couple on the brink of divorce? Some of us are trying to fucking sleep. Either split custody of Smitty or kiss and make up!”

Augustin turns back, and realizes all of a sudden how close together they are. His breath catches in his lungs. He can feel Kent’s heavy breathing on his collarbone, warm and even, and notices that there are freckles splashed across his nose, slowly fading now that the Nevada sun is out less and less. He tries to count them in twos, and gets to twenty-six when Kent finally turns back, notices their proximity, and vaults away like he’s been electrocuted.

Except, for a moment, Augustin could swear that Kent looked up at him, lips parted and pupils blown wide, and that his eyes flicked down to Augustin’s mouth.

You fucking wish, the voice in his brain says nastily. Does he fucking wish? This is news to him.

“Sorry, Swoops,” Kent says loudly, while Augustin just stands there gawping like a moron, feeling the air around him move farther from that brief, warm moment in time. His gut yawns into a gaping hollow. He can’t feel things for Kent Parson, no matter what words those things manifest into. Kent Parson is a womanizer, an idiot savant, a yappy little rat dog in an athletic blond body, and so out of play that he might as well have been on the ISS.

But what about Zimmermann?

The voice in his head is a fucking asshole and an enabler, and he’s giving Augustin a nuclear migraine. What about Zimmermann? The rumours are just rumours, peddled by people like Ron Arsineaux to sell headlines and ad space. If every hockey player who looked a little too fondly or intensely into a teammate’s eyes in the heat of the moment was actually gay, there wouldn’t be a straight player anywhere. They play professional sports. It’s a hazard of the trade.

“Yeah, yeah.” Troy mutters from the other side of the door, and the entire room is tense with adrenaline until they hear a door slam. Kent looks back at him, chest heaving. There’s a slight rip in the shoulder of his suit that must have happened when Augustin threw him onto the bed.

He threw Kent Parson onto a bed. What the literal fuck was he thinking?

“Whatever,” he says hoarsely, turning away and loosening his lucky tie with extreme prejudice. “Just show up to play. I’m up by seven points now and it’s no fun beating you because you feel like letting me win or something. Don’t fucking insult me like that.”

Kent’s jaw ticks once, twice, and then he turns away stiffly, grabbing clothes out of his suitcase and vanishing into the bathroom. When the door slams, Augustin suddenly feels so exhausted that all his residual energy is devoted to taking off his clothes. He faceplants in his disheveled bed, pettily taking the pillow he’d stolen from Kent’s bed and tucking it firmly under his arm so that his body is wrapped around it.

It’s his fault for forgetting that Kent isn’t his friend, isn’t just his linemate. Kent is his captain, and his first responsibility is to the propagation of the Aces above all else. Augustin is a cog in the machine like any other: a large, shiny cog, perhaps, but certainly not irreplaceable when it starts to fall out of sync. He got stupid for a second. This is good. This is a necessary wake-up call for both of them. Kent will kick his ass into gear, they’ll get back in sync, and Augustin can do what he does best without Kent Parson’s puppy-dog eyes following his every move.

He falls asleep, and dreams of dry air that sucks the moisture right out of his throat until he can’t speak.

The next morning, it’s as if nothing happened, except for the fact that Kent wakes him up by throwing his ripped suit jacket onto Augustin’s face and saying: “You’re lucky I brought an extra one. I’ll send you the bill.”

Everyone rightfully makes fun of Kent for his backup blazer’s absurd paisley print. It’s an eyesore, but somehow Kent makes it look not just passable, but good.

Augustin has that particular thought and immediately wonders where he can get a reliable lobotomy.

They get into Miami by midday, to the rink by four in the afternoon, and set about doing dry-land training in the visitors’ hallway to pass the time. Kent stands around in an Aces hoodie and horrendous orange flower-patterned shorts, backwards baseball cap clamping down his blond cowlicks, and directs a game of hacky-sack with a soccer ball like it's a symphony orchestra.

“My little sister can kick a ball better than you, and she’s a nerd.” He shouts at Augustin when he barely misses the ball with his foot. Augustin says something undignified about kicking balls that he doesn’t quite remember, and there’s a brief scuffle that ends with Kent in a headlock while the rest of the players cheer them on raucously.

The warmth of Kent’s laughs against his chest as he struggles to extricate himself nearly sends him back to a time where he would rather not go, and he releases Kent after the baseball cap falls onto the concrete floor with a sound like thunder. He stumbles away, and when Kent stoops to pick up his hat, his eyes meet Augustin’s, and Augustin can’t shake that persistent feeling that Kent knows something.

But all Kent says is: “Berenger’s out for this round. You’re up, Ruben.”

Media arrives to film a pre-game routine feature, and Augustin retreats to the shadows of the arena’s hallway, where Scraps and Linsky are bouncing tennis balls off the walls, tracking the trajectory with a visual acuity that Augustin can never hope to achieve.

“Wanna throw these at me?” Linsky asks when it becomes clear that Augustin is lingering and has no interest in joining the ring of Aces vying for the soccer ball in front of the camera. He’s starting in net for the first time this season, and there’s sweat beading across his brow that has nothing to do with the heat.

“Sure,” Augustin says, and picks up the tube of tennis balls.

They stand in the corner, and Augustin pitches balls off the walls, the ground, and the low ceiling for Linsky to catch. It feels nice to get some of the aggression out. He can’t throw the balls with any ferocity directly at Linsky, so he imagines hateful faces on the cement floors and pockmarked, painted brick and gets them in the nose every time.

At some point, he becomes aware that the camera is trained on his back as he throws, because he can see the light reflected in Linsky’s eyes. The itch of being watched breaks across his skin, the heat of the camera light eating through his pristine, brand-new Aces hoodie. The thud of tennis balls matches his heartbeat.

“Hey, Linsky, I gotta go check on my sticks,” he says abruptly, “Can I send Scraps over to you?”

“Uh,” Linsky looks nonplussed, “Sure.”

Augustin hands him the tennis balls and escapes into the dressing room to tape his stick, or wax it, or do whatever will get him away from there the fastest. There’s a row of his preferred sticks cut to the right length and already taped, but he pulls the sticky black strips off and sets about redoing it, waiting for his breathing to return to normal.

“Hey, Gus.”

He turns, expecting it to be Kent, only to see Troy standing in the doorway. “Oh, hey.”

“I know you don’t like doing media,” Troy says, ambling in. His shoes squeak across the skate-safe floor, “But you can’t run away every time the cameras come out.”

“Is my alternate captain telling me this, or Jeff Troy, the guy who chugged beer out of a rainboot in Sochi?” Augustin snaps, biting into the tape to rip it. Troy sits down on the bench beside him, and there’s a stifled look on his face that tells Augustin that he’s restraining himself from making a ‘big knob’ joke about Augustin’s tape job. “I don’t even get the captain himself?”

“Parse’s so focused on being a good linemate to you that he can’t really figure out how to tell you what to do,” Troy says, fiddling with the edge of his shorts. “It’s great that you’re helping him focus back on the game instead of on us. He needs that. But if every player who didn’t want to do media pulled a Berenger Special, we’d have PR up our asses.”

Augustin starts on the blade of his stick, carefully rotating the tape around so that the edges overlap evenly. “They’re not entitled to my private life.”

“You’re right, they’re not.” Troy hums, “But you’re at work right now. And like it or not, it’s part of the job.”

Augustin bites into the tape to sever it again, smoothing his palm along the blade to flatten the edges. “I can’t make Parson do my bit? He loves that camera, fucking preening all over the place.”

That makes Jeff laugh so hard that he starts wheezing. “Man, sometimes I forget how new you are. Kent fucking hates this shit, dude. Why do you think he has an Instagram for his cat, other than the fact that she’s his one true love?” He wiggles his eyebrows at Augustin, “The more he posts about her, the less he has to post about himself. Dude’s the most private person on the team. I think if he could live in the woods and only emerge for games, he would.”

Augustin resists the urge to scoff. Famous womanizer Kent Parson, with a different semi-famous girl on his arm every other month in the tabloids, aspiring hermit. “Right. Should I go back out and throw more balls at Linsky?”

Troy’s clearly biting down on another low-hanging (hah) joke, drumming his hands against his knees. A few of the other guys are starting to trickle in, tossing their hats onto benches and stripping hoodies over their heads. “Nah, they’re packing up. Light a fire under your ass, Gus. We have some cats to skin.”

He leaves Augustin, who has suddenly lost the urge to finish taping his stick, alone with those thoughts for all of three minutes before Allie successfully wrestles the speaker away from Makela and starts blasting Swedish house music. Kent comes in to the thrumming beat of Allie’s homeland, and his momentarily pained look smooths over into an easy grin with enviable speed.

The Florida Panthers are a middling team in all respects, made slightly worse by the fact that they have to live in Miami. At the first face-off, the kid opposite Augustin chirps him about his eyeliner: “You look like a fuckin’ raccoon.”

“You’d know better than me,” Augustin replies, and goes for a bodycheck the first chance that he gets. The Panthers are an emotional team, easily set off by chirps and hits, and he manages to trick and goad them into taking a stupid penalty that Kent immediately capitalizes on.

“The Aces cycle; Smith to Frisk, Frisk across to Ahlgren, Ahlgren winds up, fakes a shot, slips it to Berenger, Berenger takes it around, Newell pinches in, misses Berenger against the boards. Berenger looking for an opening, Parson dropping in, Berenger centers it- Parson SCORES! Fantastic positioning from Kent Parson, and what a pass from Augustin Berenger to open the scoring on the powerplay.”

“Ever since Berenger landed with the Aces, Parson’s kicked his play up to another caliber, and Berenger’s been playing like we all expected him to when he went first overall. What a breath of relief for Hollis St. Martin on that risky trade as the Aces celebrate opening the score.”

Kent barrels into him, screaming wordlessly in his ear, and Augustin shakes him by the shoulders, sheer joy settling over him. He gives a cheeky wave to the Panther coming out of the box as they skate back to the bench, and nearly gets jumped by an angry defender. He shouts at them in French, and gets a flurry of curses thrown at him in so many languages that they should establish their own United Nations. His heart is singing. This feels good. It feels right.

“Watch it,” Kent warns, but he’s grinning too hard for it to hold any weight. “He’s going to collapse your skinny ass like a tin can the first chance he gets.”

“He has to catch me first.”

The hits come harder, especially on Kent, but he’s so fast that they have trouble catching him, and Augustin and Smitty are there in the aftermath to clean up the bodies. They score again, Ruben putting one high glove-side early in the second period, and Augustin erupts from his seat on the bench, slamming his stick thunderously against the inside of the boards as he cheers.

It’s not until the third goal that he realizes he’s having fun. He can’t remember the last time the exhilaration and elation of watching the puck hit netting remained in his body for longer than a few moments. He can’t even remember who’s winning the bet. He doesn’t think he cares.

The final score is 5-2, but they don’t have any time to celebrate the win in Miami. The managers and staff bundle them, sweaty and yawning, out of the stadium, onto a bus, and then onto a plane, all while Augustin thinks about the wicked pass that Kent fed him late in the third to destroy any of the Panthers’ hopes of a comeback. The ease of it, the familiarity, the feeling of Kent crashing into him with glory peeling from his skin like sunlight.

Hockey is everything to Augustin, No one, in his entire career, has ever known him as well as Kent Parson does now.

They have a game against the Coyotes when they get back. Augustin’s not worried, because it’s Arizona, but he pulls out his laptop anyways as the rest of the guys catch up on some sleep, filling the plane’s cabin with a symphony of snores. He takes out his earbuds and offers one to Kent, who has a strange, vacant expression on his face as he stares at the spreadsheet on Augustin’s computer screen.

“You know,” he says, taking the earbud, “I’m tired of watching tape. Do you know any good movies?”

Augustin has to swallow a couple times before he can speak, pushing his blue-light glasses back up his nose. Yeah, he knows some good movies. He forces his voice to be impassive, casual, “Well, what kind of movies do you like?”

“Anything,” Kent shrugs, adjusting his hoodie strings. In the darkness of the cabin, the light from the laptop screen gives his face a strange, hypnotic glow, softening his features as he yawns, “Whatever you want.”

That’s a dangerous suggestion, having none at all. Augustin’s pretty sure he’s watched every movie in English that’s ever been made, and is currently working through the French ones, much to the disdain of his eyesight and the joy of the team’s optometrist, who can keep selling him blue-light glasses and increasingly strong contact lens prescriptions. He tries to think of a movie that’s interesting enough but still mainstream, masculine enough that no one would wonder why they’re watching it but not brimming with so much machismo that the characters are either subtextually gay or overtly boring and the-

“Something weird or sappy,” Kent adds, scrolling idly through his phone as he waits for Augustin to choose something. It’s Kit’s Instagram, not his own. “If you put on Pulp Fiction or the Godfather, I’ll kill you.”

Augustin ends up making a passing but tasteful comment about Natalie Portman’s general attractiveness as an excuse for them to watch Black Swan. As the movie progresses familiarly, he keeps catching himself looking over to see if Kent is enjoying it, bracing himself to see him on his phone only to watch him take in each scene with the same rapt attention he paid to Augustin's tapes.

His stomach flutters. He tells it to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down because he ate an hour ago, and there's no other reason it should be acting like this.

“Huh,” Kent says when the credits roll a couple hours later, somewhere over Texas, “It’s kinda fucked up.”

“What is?” Augustin asks, hitting the pause button so the scrolling words stop in their tracks, a blur of white against black. The whole movie’s fucked up, but he wants to know exactly what part of the story would inspire such a response. Kent looks over at him, jaw working like he’s chewing up his thoughts before he says them out loud. There’s something in his eyes that Augustin can’t read.

“My sister’s name is Beth,” is all he says, and Augustin knows that’s not what he meant to say at all.

“Sorry, I should’ve…warned you, I guess,” he replies, even though there’s no way he could have known. He should be upset that Kent’s withholding shit from him again, but they’re not friends, and his stupid brain really needs a reminder that they’re not anything more than friends either. Their hands are close together on the armrests. Augustin’s so tired that his eyelids are trying to magnetically attach themselves at the lash line.

He needs to get back out into the Vegas nightlife immediately and find himself another Theo, or else he’s going to do something so tremendously stupid that they haven’t even invented a word for it yet.

“S’okay,” Kent says quietly so that they don’t wake up Cross and Herlovsen, sleeping in the row in front of them. He rubs his eyes, “Just haven’t seen her in a while. She started her first year at Princeton, so she’s too busy to call me.”

“Hockey scholarship?”

“Not all of us are hockey families,” Kent says wryly, “Academic partial scholarship. She got the brains from my mom, it skips the men in our family. Perfect SAT and ACT, she runs this online literary magazine, and tutors new immigrants in English.”

Augustin lets out a low whistle, “She sounds like a good kid.”

Kent’s voice is warmer than it is when someone brings up Kit, which is an utter achievement. “She is.”

“You miss her?” Augustin asks, because sometimes he forgets to miss Angelique until it hits him like a truck all at once in the middle of the night, and he ends up calling her at the asscrack of dawn so that he can catch her before she goes to work.

“Yeah,” Kent says hollowly, “I miss her a lot. She’ll come to our game in Jersey in February, I got her and her friends a suite, but we fly out right after the game, so-”

“You’re the captain,” Augustin reminds him, “Blow off the optional skate and see her in the morning. Have brunch or something. My sister loves brunch.”

“You see much of your sister?”

“No. She’s working,” Augustin chews his lower lip, “She plays for the Boston Pride in the NWHL, but that’s barely enough for her to make rent and shit, so she works on player development for Boston University at the same time.”

Kent sucks in a breath through his teeth. “When does she sleep?”

“She doesn’t.” Augustin has tried multiple times to use his money for something that matters, like giving Angelique what she needs to just focus on playing good hockey, but every time he tries, Angelique calls and yells at him for so long that he has to keep his phone plugged in so it doesn’t die. He knows why she won’t take it, but it’s hard to see her with the bags under her eyes whenever he plays in Boston, and to know that she’s preparing a bunch of kids for a career she’ll never have, just like she did for him.

The guilt of it sinks into his stomach like a sandbag: not just that he forgets to call her for weeks at a time, but the fact that he lives the life that she should have. Hockey is both of their lives, but it’s only one of their careers. If life was fair, it would be Angelique’s, because they both love this game more than anything, but she’s the one who taught him to stickhandle and take a wrist shot. Without her, he’s not strapping a shinpad to his leg until it’s far too late to be as good as he is.

They asked him once, in his first year, who his hockey inspiration is. Wayne Gretzky, Maurice Richard, Patrick Roy are the kinds of answers they were expecting. He remembers their nonplussed faces when he says, clear as day, “My big sister.”

Morons. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Kent’s gonna have to stop looking at him like that before he breaks something.

There’s three hours left on the flight, and Kent ends up falling asleep and sparing Augustin those pitying looks. Augustin would be relieved if it didn’t mean that Kent’s head was a firm weight on his right shoulder, hair barely brushing the skin of his neck as he breathes evenly, in and out.

Augustin looks down at the blond head, his observations guarded by the darkness of the plane’s cabin and the sleeping figures on all sides, and feels a thought slink through his head unbidden: I think you’re going to kill me.

One day, hopefully soon, this too shall pass. Augustin is accustomed to living a life without any sort of relationships and without good hockey. If the lack of one is going to torture him like this, he can take a little comfort in the fact that, at least for the time being, he has the other.

One thing's for fucking sure: he's going to guarantee that he never goes back to having neither.

Notes:

the oilers forced a game seven on my beloved vancouver canucks so now i hate them connor mcdavid i'm gonna slander you in chapters to come

augustin's experiencing horrors beyond his comprehension except the horrors are just human emotions like desire and affection

Chapter 7

Summary:

In which Kent struggles to overcome, overcomes a struggle, and feelings are a strange thing to define

Three days before Providence comes to Vegas for the much-anticipated matchup that makes Kent want to claw his hair out, they make Ethan Cross the fourth alternate captain in Las Vegas Aces history.

It’s a big hullabaloo, as all things in Vegas tend to be. Kent couldn’t be happier with management’s choice now that Hairball is off in Seattle putting up numbers, but he’s a little pissed that the ceremony is the day before they play the Schooners, which means Hairball’s going to get a nice void of his replacement while the nerves are still raw.

Cross picks at the embroidered ‘A’ on his jersey as they leave the press conference. He’s thirty now, six years older than Kent is, and he’s earned the letter and then some. Sometimes, Kent thinks he earned the letter long before Kent earned his own.

“Congrats,” he says, even though he’s said it so often today that the word has lost meaning, but this is the one that really matters. “You deserve it.”

“Thanks, Parse,” Cross says, grinning at him, “Are you and Gus coming to the party tonight? Swoops told me to ask, even though he’s the one throwing it for me, but I’m not about to split hairs over it.”

“I am, I don’t know about Augustin.” Kent muses. “I can't imagine he won't, but it is a Saturday, so who the fuck knows?”

“If you go, he’ll go,” Cross remarks as they get in the elevator. “I think you’re his emotional support blond or something. He only does media if you’re there, he only goes out if you go.”

They’ve been putting the two of them together for PR spots and interviews for a few weeks now, ever since Smitty pack-bonded with Ruben during the Florida roadie. The day after they returned from Miami, the media team shot Augustin’s player intro for the jumbotron, along with Ruben, Allie, and Frisk. Kent wasn’t supposed to be there, but Marketing called him in at the last minute so they could film a commercial spot with him and Augustin.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Augustin asked when he walked in dressed in everything but his helmet, hair carefully tamed with enough gel and hairspray to glue down Marie Antoinette’s wig. It took him a moment to answer, because the combination of Augustin’s eyeliner under the stark lights and artfully tousled hair was…striking, to say the least.

Kent could tell the makeup team had had fun with him.

“Came to say goodbye on your first day of school,” he managed to say. Augustin made a face just before the director started yelling at them to get in place.

They’d started with Augustin, which was a stupid move. Kent watched the camera over the filmographer’s shoulder, and made comments as Augustin struggled to add a significant amount of gravitas to his shots.

“Would you relax?” He advised after the third time they had to film Augustin lifting his head to stare dead into the camera. Augustin whipped his head up to look at him, jaw ticking mutinously.

“Parson, I’m about to lay you the fuck out. Stop backseat modelling.”

Kent flashed back momentarily to when Augustin lifted him onto the bed in Tampa like he’d weighed nothing at all, and struggled to keep the flush from his face. He’d been trying to erase that specific sensation from his brain. “Just treat it like it’s a game.”

“Ugh,” Augustin looked down again, hair dangling in front of his eyes. “C'est tellement stupide, putain.”

Kent shot the director a thumbs up, and she barked, “Action!”

Augustin looked up this time, directly at him, and Kent felt like he’d been knocked over by a tornado.

Augustin’s eyes were dark and glittering, a tiny, knowing smirk playing across his typically stoic face as he tilted his head slightly, a single dark curl falling across his forehead. He looked as if he was going to eat Kent alive, and then unfold his brain and study it like a map.

“Cut,” the director said, “Perfect.”

Kent coughed once, to clear his throat. “Yeah, you looked almost like a living, breathing human.”

“Aw, fuck you, Parson, at least I can reach the top shelf,” Augustin retorted as he swapped places with Frisk, his skates gliding effortlessly over ice. “You had to ask me to get Kit down from the top of the fridge this morning.”

“You fucking stole the stepladder!”

“You have a stepladder?” Augustin asked, stone-faced, “This is so much worse than I thought.”

“At least I can fucking kill a spider.”

“That wasn’t a spider,” Augustin hissed, “It was a creature from Hell, and it crawled out of the sink drain and up my fucking hand! You hit me with a fucking loaf of bread, and its guts are still on my t-shirt!”

“Guys, Mom and Dad are fighting again,” Smitty complained. Kent clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Son, your father and I have something to tell you.”

“You’re adopted,” Augustin agreed, propping his chin on the end of his stick, “We’re sorry you had to find out this way, champ.”

Smitty pulled back his jersey sleeve to expose a brown wrist, inspected it like he was wearing a watch, and then looked back up at them, “Wow, I never would have guessed.”

“Quiet on set!” the director snapped, because Frisk couldn’t stop snickering.

The commercial spots they shot seemed easier for Augustin, since they mostly involved doing real plays while a couple of cameramen followed them around. They had fun with it: dipping, weaving, passing and shooting. It was only when they filmed stills that Kent started to realize the predicament he might have been in.

They stood chest to chest, meant to turn and stare directly into the camera at the same time, but a light had gone out. Justifiably terrified that the ornery hockey players would fuck up her set, the director told them not to move under any circumstances, which meant Kent had no choice but to look up at Augustin’s face at close range while Augustin watched Frisk and Allie shoot a commercial spot on the other end of the ice.

He had a thin white scar on his lower lip and another one above his left eyebrow. No freckles, but the beginnings of stubble on his cheeks, and dark bags under his eyes creased with flesh-coloured powder to disguise them. And of course, the fucking eyeliner.

“Frisk puts too much weight on his toes,” Augustin commented quietly, and Kent struggled to swallow, mouth dry. In the dimness, Augustin’s face was soft, almost fond, but before Kent could say anything, the light flickered back on and Augustin’s face was as sharp and cold as it ever was. He looked down at Kent. “We should tell him.”

“Sure.” Kent said weakly. Augustin’s head did that little tilt, eyes blinking slowly.

“3, 2, 1, action!”

The only reason they left on time that day was because Kent had a lot of practice smirking at cameras when he didn’t particularly feel like it.

Back in the Q, Jack used to read books on the First World War on roadies, because of course he did. He told Kent once about how men in the trenches tended to pair off, becoming a single entity with two heads and four arms rather than two individuals. It was a coping mechanism, a way of finding comfort in the midst of horror and trauma. As long as you had your other half, you were never alone.

“I bet they totally jacked each other off,” Kent had said irreverently, head lolling onto Jack’s shoulder. Jack had flicked his forehead.

“Don’t be fucking disrespectful. They were probably just friends. Like brothers.”

“I mean, at least some of them gotta have done it. Statistically speaking.”

No one’s shooting a rifle at his head or forcing him to sleep in the mud, but Kent figures the gist of the whole thing is relatively similar. The lines tend to blur after a little while, and Kent's never been one for well-defined lines in the first place.

“It’s just because we live together,” he excuses. Cross seems to accept that, too busy texting his wife a picture of his new jersey to actually do any emotional analysis.

“It’s sweet, in a weird Pacific Rim kind of way.” He snaps his fingers and points at Kent, “Tell him I watched the second one, by the way, and that I kinda liked it.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He drives home from Cross’ press conference with the images of that commercial in his brain. Beth sends him a picture every time she sees it on TV or YouTube, usually captioned something along the lines of “you look like a dick” and “my friend wants the French one’s number. Is he single?”

His mom texted him about it too: You both look wonderful, honey. I’m glad you two are getting along.

“Getting along” is a strong term for whatever they’re doing, and also somehow entirely too weak.

“Seattle tomorrow,” Augustin says when Kent walks in the door, “I need those notes on Ballantine’s style of play that you promised.”

“Sorry, Professor, I was busy giving Cross a promotion.” Kent replies, depositing his keys in the new dish by the door since Augustin’s leather jacket is hanging on the hook now, and picking Kit up when she meows insistently at him. “She have dinner yet?”

“I saw no reason to starve her just because you can’t get your ass back on time.”

They're starting to fall into a weird little domestic routine: Kent wakes up early, makes coffee for both of them, and drags Augustin out of bed for a run. Augustin's taken to feeding Kit in the evenings, and pays for half of the frozen meals that Kent has delivered. On evenings when they don't have games, they go over game tapes together. On weekdays, Augustin cooks breakfast from scratch and sometimes they silently watch a movie together before their games. The next time they leave Vegas, for a couple of away games in Canada, Augustin waives his right to room alone.

“It’s easier to review without having to drag you across the hall,” is what he said before Kent could ask.

They'd mic'd both him and Augustin up for the game against Edmonton. Nira had to come stomping in between periods to yank the mic packs out of both their jerseys and inform them that they didn't have a single minute of usable footage where Augustin wasn't swearing at Kent, Kent wasn't saying unflattering things about Augustin, or both of them weren't making fun of their star player's inability to not be a fucking puck-hog and show-off. As punishment, both of them were forced to film a ‘Play with the Aces’ promotional feature, where they played Boggle.

“This is a fucking nightmare,” Augustin told the cameraman, fully serious. It became the video's intro. Kent doesn't know what the fuck he'd been complaining about, since he won, but since the video blew up, it feels like they’ve been doing promotions together every other day.

On Tuesday and Saturday nights, whether or not they have a game, Kent knows not to wait up for Augustin, who wanders in between three and five in the morning and can't be pulled out of bed until at least ten unless they have a matinee game or morning practice. He texts Beth back: srry to ur friend, but i think theres someone already.

He tried to broach the topic of Augustin moving out a couple of times, but finds himself reluctant to do so. He doesn’t really want Augustin to leave. He likes co-existing with someone again, he likes coming home to an apartment that has the warmth of another human being living there instead of just Kit pawing for treats.

He does notice, though, that Augustin’s been wearing the same five or six outfits the entire time he’s been here, like he’s still living out of his tiny suitcase. He’s strategic with it: he has a few rings and necklaces he swaps out, and all his clothes are non-descript cuts and neutral colours. Kent probably wouldn’t have noticed if he didn’t see how often Augustin does laundry.

“Did I forget to tell you how to get packages here?” he asks as he’s putting their dinner dishes away in the dishwasher. Augustin looks up from his phone, eyes narrowed.

“Nah, Mike let me know.”

“Okay.” Kent says quietly, and goes to get the game notes from his room. When he passes by Augustin’s room, he peeks in the open door: other than a wool trench coat laid across the armchair, it’s pristine, as if no one has stayed in there in months.

“Fucking took you long enough,” Augustin mutters, pen dangling from in his mouth. He’s wearing his Aces hoodie, sweatpants, and his hair is scraped back with a squiggly plastic headband. He holds out an expectant hand, and Kent deposits the crumpled stack of sticky notes in his palm. His nose wrinkles as he starts to sort them, “You’re a fucking animal, Parson.”

Kent resists the urge to smash Augustin’s laptop with a rubber mallet when the spreadsheet pops up. “I have a system.”

“Uh huh,” Augustin says mockingly, holding up the napkin covered in blue scrawl buried amidst the sticky notes. “Sure.”

“Are you going to Cross’ party tonight?”

Augustin doesn’t look up from his screen, even when Kent dangles Kit right in front of his face. He just reaches out to scratch the cat under the chin. “Are you?”

“Yeah, I kinda have to,” Kent winces as Kit claws up his chest and onto his shoulder. Augustin grunts in assent, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes tiredly.

“Yeah. I’ll come out.”

Kent leaves the apartment with somebody in the passenger seat and comes back late and alone. Augustin stuck around for longer than he normally does, but Kent saw him get into a cab after someone in the back alley behind the bar when he went out looking for Ruben and Smitty, who were busy throwing up behind a garbage can. He almost said something, but Augustin was looking around like he was being followed, and so Kent just let him go.

God, if he has to have a talk with Augustin about safe sex and getting tested, he’s going to drown himself in a bathtub.

Augustin slumps back in at three in the morning, and wakes up close to one in the afternoon, after Kent slams a fist against his door and hollers: “Seattle’s not gonna wait around for you, asshole!”

Something heavy, probably a pillow, hits the door hard enough to shake the hinges. Kent leaves a travel mug of coffee in front of the door and goes downstairs to warm up the car.

They’re neck in neck, points-wise: Augustin has thirty-one, and Kent has thirty-three, and he’s on a ten-game heater. The media’s been buzzing about it for a couple days now. Neither of them have ever had this many points so early in the season, and despite their slow start, the Aces are slowly climbing the Western Conference standings. The lines are settling down, and the roster is stabilizing. The fear of being traded that was strangling the dressing room seems to be easing.

The media has christened them a lot of things. The most popular ones right now are the Parson-Berenger Effect, which makes them sound like a physics experiment gone wrong, and the Jackpot Line, which is just kind of lazy. Kent thinks his favourite is Double or Nothing.

They play Providence in three days. Kent knows he should be focused on beating the Schooners first, but he always gets…weird when they play Providence, for reasons which are both obvious and petrifying. His senses become skewed, like a compass with its lodestone dislodged. He’s either leagues better, or leagues more shit than he normally plays. Usually it’s the latter.

Maybe this time will be different, he thinks as he watches Augustin chug enough espresso to corrode a hole in his stomach lining. His nerves are already so frayed that there’s nowhere to go but up.

There’s more than a few familiar faces in the crowd as they warm up: in the Schooners’ end, Shetty’s kids scream and pound the glass, and Kent laughs to himself when they’re put up on the jumbotron. The twins and Kendra are wearing Schooners jerseys, but Maeve is still wearing her Aces jersey, which clashes brilliantly with her red hair.

On their end, near the bend of the rink, sit Mike the doorman and his daughter Harriet, who is both the sweetest and sharpest kid Kent's met since his sister was little. He jumps into the glass to shake it, and then goes to toss his stick over before he realizes she already has one. He can recognize the model and tape job from here.

What a dick.

Harriet holds up a pink poster board covered in glitter glue: Double or Nothing: whoever gives me a stick is my new favourite player. She gives him a thumbs down and sticks out her tongue at him when he makes a sad face at her. The kid is grifting them, but she’s wearing Kent’s jersey, so he can’t complain much.

“You’re a dick,” he still says when he skates over to Augustin in the corner. He stops with a spray of snow that settles into Augustin’s skates.

“She changed her sign,” Augustin remarks, face contorting at the sudden dampness of his socks, “When I was over there, it said #7, can I get your sister’s autograph? She played me.”

“She’s a smart kid.” Kent agrees. He can see Hairball and Shetty talking to Scraps at the red line, and smacks his stick against Augustin’s shinpads. “Mind if I dip out for a sec?”

“The fuck do I need you for?” says Augustin generously, and goes back to stickhandling around two pucks. Kent sticks out his tongue petulantly, and the laughter of the crowd means that the whole thing was caught on camera.

“El capitan,” Shetty grins when he skates over. Kent hates that the guy who was the Aces is now wearing an ugly, baby-blue Schooners away jersey, but he manages to crack a smile anyway as Shetty asks him, “How are things?”

“You want me to spill trade secrets?”

“We see the games,” Hairball comments, his mullet on full, glorious display and handlebar mustache twitching. “Does Genie know you’re cheating on him?”

Genie does know, and he milks it by texting Kent and Swoops a bunch of Aces game clips with a multitude of frowny faces once in a while, when they’re not busy discussing how best to help him propose to his girlfriend. “What can I say? I’m a homewrecker.”

Kent finds himself falling into an easy rhythm with Hairball and Shetty that ends abruptly and leaves him feeling like he’s dangling off of a cliff when they get funnelled off the ice for the Zamboni and pre-game rituals. He waves goodbye to Shetty as they step off the ice, and his lungs collapse in on themselves like a tin can at the bottom of the ocean.

“You okay?” Swoops asks him as they stand in the tunnel waiting for the announcer to summon them back onto the ice. Kent looks over at Augustin, who’s predictably leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, and feels his feet brush the solid ground. He nods.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

He doesn’t look up at the jumbotron as their player intros run, but he sees the flicker of Augustin’s shape on the cold, white ice in front of him, deja vu causing him to shake his head from side to side to clear it. If he’s going to wear the C on his jersey, he’s going to have to act like he’s earned it.

He’s already anticipated that both Shetty and Hairball, especially Shetty, will be able to shut him down like nobody else. They’ve taught him a lot of what he knows, and seen the rest of what he brought with him from the first day he tugged on an Aces jersey. The beginning of the game proves it to him immediately: wherever he turns in the defensive zone, Hairball’s all over him, and if he manages to break out of the zone and down into the other end, Shetty’s putting him against the boards with alarming regularity, negating Kent's speed by knocking him over every chance he gets.

“I used to babysit your kids for free!” he yells at Shetty during a scrum as he’s being hauled away by a massive Schooners defender by the neck. “And you make three million dollars a year! Tell this asshole to get off of me!”

“You broke my television teaching the twins how to play baseball, I’m not telling him shit!”

The first period ends with no goals, and Augustin’s teeth are gnashing.

“You’re playing like an Ace,” he says after Wilson goes over the next period’s strategy with them. Kent points to his jersey and raises an eyebrow like well, yeah. Augustin shakes his head furiously. “Stop it. They know your style, and your moves. You need to play differently.”

If he rolls his eyes any further back, they’ll fall out, “How do you-”

“Play like you did in Rimouski.”

The only word to describe the way he used to play in Juniors is ‘codependent.’ He stares at Augustin, searching for a hint of joking that he knows he won’t find. There’s a reason he stopped playing that way. It’s kid hockey, the kind of hockey you can only play with someone you’ve known for most of your life. In a league with turnover like this, it’s an impossible task.

“I haven’t played like that in a long time,” he cautions, “We’ve never practiced-”

“Parson, I played two years of junior hockey against you. Did you really think that I never noticed how you played in the Q?” Augustin’s eyes don’t stray from Kent’s face as he talks, as focused as an arrow shot, “Nobody would fucking shut up about it. So either fucking trust me to keep up with you, or this loss is gonna be on your hands. Smitty!”

“What’s going on?” Smitty asks. Augustin turns to him before Kent can get a word in edgewise and starts giving instructions: fewer hits, more passes, more driving straight to the net rather than around it. The more he hastily describes, the more Kent realizes that he isn’t kidding and that this isn’t a fluke. Augustin wants him to play like he did in Juniors.

Trust me to keep up with you. The last person that said that to him didn’t keep up, and Kent realized through blocked calls and a lonely draft day that his favourite kind of hockey was an impossible dream. He almost says no. He almost calls the whole fucking thing off, but then Augustin turns to him and nods, and Kent finds himself nodding back without even thinking about it.

It’s one game of the regular season. If they lose, they lose, and Kent will hate it but then it’s onto the next game. If they win…

Trust me. He wonders idly, as he lines up for the face-off, if Augustin really knows how much those two words must matter to both of them.

It’s like riding a bike. The rink is bigger and brighter, the crowd louder and more numerous, but the memories are interwoven with his DNA, twining around his muscles. It’s just a matter of digging it up and taking it for a spin. He wins the faceoff, turns off his adult brain, and lets the kid in his heart take over.

For a moment, it looks like he’s all alone as they struggle into the offensive zone, but then there’s a flash of black rather than blue, and a helmet with curls of dark hair peeking out and around its sides is in the perfect place, and exactly the right time.

One pass, two pass, long pass, short pass. They volley it back and forth, and then the puck is in the net.

“-he SCORES. What a play by Berenger and Parson, who absolutely confounded Shetland and Schooners’ goalie Johannes Brodt, and the Aces are up by one.”

“Take a look at those passes, you just can’t find that sort of thing anywhere else in the League. Former Aces veteran Shetland’s shaking his head as he goes back to the bench, he’s been shutting Parson down until now. I don’t even think he knows where that came from.”

There’s a glow somewhere in Kent’s ribs, warm and tangible as he sits back down on the bench. He feels like a kid again, playing shinny on the ponds with his dad’s friends’ kids in upstate New York while his dad watched and cheered. It’s a hazy memory, painted in oil and watercolour rather than something real, but the stars glimmer in halos of white amid a velvet blue sky and the ice has visible lines, from brushstrokes and skate blades.

“Holy shit,” Swoops says when he comes tumbling back onto the bench after his shift, “Where the hell have you been hiding that?”

The strategy is by no means infallible: both Smitty and Augustin take too much time to adjust for the Schooners not to take advantage and sneak in a goal, but by the time they hit the end of the second, it's as if he's seventeen again, playing the best hockey of his life on NHL ice like he always dreamed he would.

The second period ends 1-1, and both he and Augustin spend the intermission filling in Frisk and Allie, their words tumbling over each other and Augustin sometimes lapsing into French without noticing, which Frisk luckily understands to a certain degree. Wilson lets them yell instructions at each other, arms crossed as he and the other coaches unsubtly eavesdrop. Allie’s nearly bouncing off the walls by the end, jabbering excitedly in Swedish and English.

The third period is usually when Kent is the most exhausted, but not today. Today, his feet are flying. It’s still not perfect. Sometimes Augustin’s not where he’s supposed to be, but he always gets there eventually, and Smitty’s just too big to not be hitting other players, but Kent can feel his old self and current self sliding together, superimposed on top of each other until they form one single entity.

With a minute left in the third period, they do it again. Augustin scores this time, a stunning one-timer off a pass where Kent didn’t even look before he fired. He just knew.

“Parson centers it- Berenger SCORES! What a phenomenal game for the Jackpot Line. You can see Aces GM Hollis St. Martin celebrating up there, and for good reason. He seems to have discovered something incredible.”

As they collide like stars, Augustin is as beautiful as Kent sometimes imagines he is, and just this once, he’s not even scared to say it. That’s what it is to be seventeen: the world is beautiful, it is wide, and he’s not scared of its teeth.

“You fucking beauty!”

They give Shetty the second star of the game to the delight of the Aces faithful, and Augustin gets the first. He skates out onto the ice to the roar of the crowd, waving his stick in the air, and Kent watches from the tunnel as he skates around center ice.

“Aren’t you glad he’s on our team now?” Swoops says fondly from behind him.

Kent opens his mouth to answer, but stops when he sees Augustin’s expression magnified on the screen. He looks almost confused by the cheers and whistles that don’t seem to end, his head swiveling around to take it all in as he skates up to the glass and pops his stick over and into a cheering little boy’s hands. Something stirs in his stomach as Augustin smiles slightly. Not his careful, calculating smirk, or his taunting, vicious grin, but a tiny, genuine smile as he looks up once more at the jumbotron, eyes wide with carefully disguised surprise.

“I don’t think they’ve ever cheered for him like this before,” he says quietly. Swoops’ brow contracts as Kent says aloud what he’s been thinking when he’s not overrun with adrenaline, “I don’t think anyone’s ever wanted to watch him play like this before.”

“The Aeros…” Swoops trails off as Augustin steps back onto the tunnel mats, his face breaking into a wide smile, “Way to fucking play, Gus. There’s press waiting for you in the locker room.”

Augustin looks up at him, almost dazed, “Thanks, Troy.”

He ambles away and they both watch him go. Swoops’ face is contracted with concern. “The Aeros fans loved him.”

“I’m not talking about the fans.” Kent says quietly. “When do we play Houston?”

“Uh…in a few weeks, after the Nashville-St. Louis roadie. Home game.” Swoops gives him a warning look, “Parse, don’t.”

“Something happened,” Kent retorts as they make their way slowly back to the locker room. “We all know it. We all thought he was going to be a fucking problem-”

“Who’s we?” Swoops wheels around to step in front of Kent and settle a hand on his shoulder. His face is uncharacteristically serious. He’s the same age, same draft class as Augustin, Kent remembers in that moment. Older than Kent, like a lot of people are. “Listen, man. Augustin’s…pretty fucking different than he was when he was drafted, but so are you. So am I. People just change as they get older.”

He doesn’t say the quiet part out loud: Not everyone has something cataclysmic happen to them. Not everyone is you.

“Yeah,” Kent says, just so Swoops will stop looking at him like that. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Next game’s Providence,” Swoops slings an arm around Kent’s neck and gives him a slight shake, “And I owe Mashkov an ass-kicking.”

Augustin’s still subdued when they get in the car, to the point that he declines the keys when Kent offers them. He sits staring out the window blankly as they drive the twenty-minutes from the arena to Kent’s apartment, which Kent has started to think of as theirs.

Danger, danger, his rational brain says to him, but his thoughts are still stained with the residual joy of the game and the abject concern of watching Augustin throw his black suit jacket over the back of the couch and loosen the tie around his neck like he's been recently hit over the head with a baseball bat. Danger isn’t remotely on his mind.

“I, uh…” he can’t make enough sense of his thoughts to say anything except, “Good game tonight.”

Augustin looks up at him, face vaguely confused and so, so much younger than he normally appears. “Oh. Thanks.”

Before Kent can say anything else, anything that actually means something, Augustin’s phone rings, his sister’s name popping up on the screen. It’s late in Boston, close to two in the morning, but she was probably awake watching the game just like Beth does. Augustin stares blankly at the screen for a second before life flickers back into his eyes.

“Sorry, I gotta-”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Hallo?” Augustin says as he disappears into his room. “Ouais, merci. J'ai aussi trouvé que c'était un bon jeu. Je ne savais pas qu'une foule pouvait être aussi bruyante.”

The door clicks shut, and Kent’s left alone with Kit looking up at him. She meows.

“Yeah,” he replies quietly, stooping to pick her up, “I don’t know what to do, either.”

Notes:

hey can the universe give the canucks a fucking break please

this chapter and chapter nine are so filler but also the biggest problem with modern television is the lack of filler episodes so like. fucking deal, methinks. is the chapter good? no! but again, fucking deal.

I don't usually translate the French, because i like to maintain an air of mystery (i am lazy), but you should know that at the end Augustin says "I also thought it was a good game. I never knew a crowd could be so loud."

Chapter 8

Summary:

in which Augustin learns empathy, Kent has no clue, and Jack Zimmermann gives him one

The night before they play Providence is a Tuesday.

Augustin looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and can’t help but feel a bit dissatisfied. He’s in all black: black sweater, black pants, black-rimmed glasses partly because they change his face and partly because he ran out of contact lenses and is saving his last pair for tomorrow’s game. He gelled his hair for some reason, so that it rises and falls in even waves, and he can’t tell if he looks like a skinny Clark Kent, a stagehand at a local theater, or like a jazz band saxophonist.

None of those three things are particularly conducive to having casual sex with the maternity ward nurse named Craig, who doesn’t have social media or a cable package and is too tired driving home from night shifts to recognize Augustin’s bare face plastered on billboards.

Maybe it’s for the best. Craig texted him first this time, which means that he’s getting a little too far away from the ‘casual’ part of their agreement. He might as well give Craig a good story to tell his friends about the guy who dressed up as a tech-entrepreneur-supervillain for their last hookup.

He ruffles his hair until most of the gel has been rendered useless, and exits the bathroom before he can second-guess himself.

“Oy, Parson, I’m heading out-”

He finds Kent curled up on the couch, staring blankly at the black television screen.

He’s never seen Kent so utterly lifeless, a still, hollow lump like a dead log on a sandbar. They’d finished strength training four hours ago, and Kent had been in good spirits then, joking and jabbing the younger Aces about their weightlifting form. They’d had dinner, some sort of enchilada thing, while talking about the season’s trajectory, and Augustin had left Kent happily watching the Yankees game an hour ago. A more drastic change and he might get whiplash.

“Getting your rocks off?” Kent asks when Augustin closes the guest bedroom door. His voice is dull and humourless. “Have fun.”

“Thanks,” Augustin says, because Kent’s not asking for sympathy, or attention. He’s not sulking. He’s just staring into space like he’s seeing something playing in the air, a video or photo reel that Augustin can’t see. It’s really none of his fucking business.

He almost makes it out the door. Almost.

I’m not gonna make it tonight. Don’t wait up. Sorry.

He blocks Craig’s number before he can get a response and turns off that phone, sliding it into his back pocket. “Quel est votre dysfonctionnement principal?”

Kent rolls over, staring at him with hazy, confused eyes. “What is my…main dysfunction?”

“Primary malfunction, but yeah,” Augustin says, leaving the car keys in the dish by the door and his jacket on the hook. He crosses his arms, “Did somebody die?”

Kent clambers upright, “Nobody died. Don’t you have someone waiting?”

He feels his lips compress. Of course Kent has noticed a pattern, he’s not stupid. “Depends. Are you going to tell me about your problems now, or are you going to drag your ass through a few shit games first? Because we play Providence tomorrow and that’s a game I don’t feel like losing.”

Kent flinches like he’s been shot, which for him is the barest twitch of motion. But of course. What else could the problem be, other than the thing everyone’s been talking about for a week now?

“Ah,” Augustin surmises neatly, “Providence. Jack Zimmermann.”

“Why do you look like you’re wearing a Steve Jobs Halloween costume?” Kent retorts, bracing his elbows on his knees. Even his hair is limp, the cowlicks pathetically curled in on themselves. “Does your girlfriend have a weird fetish or something?”

Augustin feels his lips seal tighter. “We weren’t dating. It got too…much.”

Craig was nice. Augustin had liked him, and in another world, where he was less of everything, maybe they would’ve dated and seen where it went. But all Craig knows about him is that he’s a paralegal named James who swims as a hobby, which means he knows nothing about Augustin at all.

To be fair, it’s not like people knowing his name and occupation makes him any more known by them.

Kent snorts scornfully, “Right. Typical hockey-bro shit, huh?”

He’s one to fucking judge, “Hey, I’m not the one who pals around with D-list actresses and underwear models.”

“I never actually dated any of them,” Kent mutters, refusing to meet Augustin’s eyes.

“Nah, you just make them sign NDAs.”

Augustin’s never been a particularly nice or comforting guy, and maybe he shouldn’t start trying, because Kent glares at him so hard that he can feel his skin eroding from the heat of it. “You know what? Why don’t you go and fuck your not-girlfriend, ghost her, and we can forget this ever fucking happened?”

Augustin’s not the most comforting guy, and he’s also incapable of not rising to a challenge, even an unspoken one. He retorts, “I don’t fucking get it. It’s just Zimmermann. He’s a big guy and he’s fast, but he plays the most traditional, cookie-cutter hockey I’ve ever seen in my fucking life.”

“You don’t know-” Kent cuts himself off, face flushing, “You don’t know him.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Augustin can feel all the things he’s been forcing down, all the things he’s been carefully compartmentalizing, starting to seethe in the canister of his chest, “Do you?”

He means it like this: do you still talk to him much? Because if not, maybe you should.

Kent does not take it this way.

“Fuck you.” he spits like venom, “He was my best fucking friend, he and I- it was supposed to be the two of us, and now I have to watch him play with other fucking people. You wouldn’t fucking get it.”

It was supposed to be the two of us. Augustin knew he was just a wax copy of Jack Zimmermann when he was traded (now with movable limbs and worse tendencies!), but somehow, he’s let himself forget. He almost started to think, especially after the last game, that he was a player unto himself and not just Kent’s backup Quebecois model.

He sticks it hard into his brain, pinning it up and circling it in bright red. He’s here to get the Aces to a cup run, and maybe they’ll keep him, and maybe they won’t, but he has to remember that he’s here to recreate lost magic. Not make something new.

“Oh, fuck you,” Kent says, taking him out of his own mind. His jaw is clenched tightly. “You always fucking do that, acting like nothing bothers you, like nothing fucking matters.”

What an absurd fucking thing to say.

“Do you want me to start crying?” Augustin sneers, “You want me to call my mommy complaining that my linemate is cheating on me emotionally with a guy he hasn’t played with in eight years? You want me to tell you that you’re being a fucking asshole? Grow the fuck up, Parson. Put all those big feelings away.”

“At least I feel something. What the fuck do you feel?”

Augustin looks at Kent, really looks. The fierce grey eyes that glimmer green with intelligence and in the sun, right now alight with anger. The potential that strains against his tanned, freckled skin, the clever twist to his mouth and the dimples in his cheeks.

What do you feel? God, so much that it hurts.

“I try not to,” he says honestly. “It’s a lot easier that way. You should try it. It might make your life more manageable.”

It’s a stupid thing to say to Kent Parson, of all people, who can no easier stop feeling everything all the time than he can stop playing hockey. Sometimes, people have greatness inside of them, buried deep below so that the outer shell is unassuming until put under pressure. Sometimes, people have greatness inside of them, just under the surface and so bright that it hurts to look at them. Kent is the latter. Augustin used to think he was the former, but he becomes less sure the older that he gets, the more of life that he lives this way.

“So all you do is play hockey,” Kent says bitterly. Augustin shifts in his seat. He used to do more. He used to be more. And then he learned that people didn’t want him to be more than his hockey, and you know what? In all fucking honesty, he doesn’t want to be more than his hockey either. He feels his jaw tense.

“Yeah. I prefer it like that.”

Kent stares at him for a moment longer, and then he asks the question that Augustin’s been dreading for the last month. “What the hell happened with the Aeros, Augustin?”

He says Augustin’s name like nobody else he knows: it starts off committing to the French pronunciation, but his conviction fails halfway through and he defaults to the English ending.

Augustin stands abruptly. He gave up the opportunity to get laid, something he has no idea if he will get with regularity once the season is over, to be judged and prodded by Kent Parson. The question that is asked is what the hell happened with the Aeros? The real question, though, is this: what the hell happened to you to make you this way?

The answer is that “It’s none of your fucking business.”

Kent stares up at him mutinously for a moment. A heartbeat passes. Then two. Augustin can hear the clock in the kitchen ticking in the silence. He doesn’t pray often, or ever, but he hopes in that moment that Kent will deflate as he always does in the end, acquiesce to Augustin’s brittle nature and they can forget that this ever happened just like Kent suggested. He wants things to go back to how they were before. He doesn’t want Kent Parson’s pity, or care, or love. And he definitely doesn’t want Kent to know what happened to make him this way.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though?

Of course it would, but it wouldn’t be realistic. Augustin’s seen the cutthroat world of sport firsthand, without the kid gloves that everyone has handled Kent with for his entire fucking life, and he’s going to play it like the game it is. He can’t win, and he never will, but he’s going to play it for as long as he can before the lights go out and his stick is hung up on hooks on the wall of his father’s garage.

Kent looks away first. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

He goes to unblock Craig’s number and salvage the last dregs of the night when Kent quietly says, “Cross said to tell you that he liked the second Pacific Rim movie.”

Before he can think, Augustin says, “Is he fucking crazy?”

“Yeah,” Kent laughs, and it’s so natural that it almost manages to erase the last five minutes from the room, leaving only scraps of the anger stuck in corners and under the couch cushions. “Is it actually that bad?”

“Oh my God,” Augustin says, taking his glasses off to pinch the bridge of his nose. “So bad.”

“Huh,” Kent says disbelievingly, and Augustin can’t help but rise to a challenge like a fish to a shiny lure. He sits on the couch and opens his hand for the remote. Kent hands it to him, the pads of his fingers slipping against the side of Augustin’s palm, and Augustin’s momentary insanity rears its ugly head.

He bites his tongue so hard he tastes metal, and hits play on Pacific Rim: Uprising.

“Wow.” Kent says after two hours. “That was a really bad movie.”

Of course, Augustin knows when he’s being played, but for some reason, he doesn’t particularly want to care.

---

“Shh.”

“Don’t fucking push me then.”

Kent doesn’t open his eyes. The dressing room is empty, but just outside the doors is a group of children in every sense except the literal kind. He’s already picked out Ruben and Smitty’s voices, as well as Oliver Bloom, the other call-up from the farm team this year. He’s pretty sure Allie’s out there too, because someone’s shoes are squeaking.

Augustin’s voice cuts through the chatter like a silver knife. “What are you fuckheads doing? Why are you blocking the door-”

There’s a flurry of hissed shushes, and Kent struggles to keep his face neutral. He can imagine the affronted look on Augustin’s face.

“Parse’s napping,” Allie whispers, “He went missing from warm-ups and we found him in here.”

“Okay, everybody shut up,” he hears Augustin say, vicious glee underrunning his voice, “Smitty, go to the maintenance guy and ask him if he has any superglue-”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Kent says out loud, and there’s a discontented chorus of ‘aw mans’ and ‘you woke up him ups’. Someone, probably Smitty, smacks Augustin, and there’s a second, much louder smacking sound and a shrill yelp.

Kent doesn’t open his eyes as people start filing in until there’s a creak of someone sitting down by his head. He doesn’t need to open them to know that it’s Augustin, but he does anyway. There’s a halo created by the ceiling light around his curls, so that Kent can’t make out his expression while his eyes adjust to the light.

“Are we good?” he asks gruffly. They haven’t talked about their latest shouting match, which is becoming par for the course. Usually, throwing sand on the fire puts it out, but Kent can still feel it burning down the fuse this time. The blood rushes from his head as he sits up, and he has to steady himself with a hand braced on either side of him on the flat bench.

“Yeah,” he says awkwardly. “We’re good. We can’t play like we did against Seattle. It’s back to normal.”

Augustin nods once, and then his eyes snap somewhere else, “Daniel John Fitzgerald McCandles, put my fucking water bottle down before I tie your freakishly long neck into a knot.”

“You’re such a fucking killjoy, Gus.”

He feels nauseous and has to swallow it down as he does press, saying something meaningless about playing well and making sure they get pucks in deep and keep driving the net or whatever. He bores most of the journalists into leaving him alone pretty quickly. Of course, some of them ask him the questions that make him want to scream, leading questions about Jack's sexuality that Kent spits out rehearsed and vaguely supportive answers to.

Augustin's movements are stiff once the media clears out. They get dressed silently until Augustin quietly asks, “Do those questions ever bother you?”

Kent feels his heart stop. He doesn't like to ask whether players support the gays or whatever: frankly, if they don't, he doesn't want to know. He’s already done a great job of letting Swoops—the only guy on the team who knows that Kent doesn’t actually date the women he’s seen with and isn’t so stupid that he can’t connect two dots—shame the casual homophobes like Carl had been into silence. Maybe it's selfish, but he's not interested in the gay circus monkey gig Jack's been forced into, and he's not inclined to find out whether he has to avoid someone because they harbour secret disdain for people like him. He lives in a cloud of ignorant bliss. It’s nice here. Smells like cotton candy sometimes.

But the thought of Augustin being one of those people secretly harbouring the sentiment makes him violently ill. “What do you mean?”

“I think they should just leave him alone,” Augustin mutters after a swift beat, mouth twisted into a sullen frown. There’s a strange sense of urgency in his tone, “Zimmermann, I mean. Who cares who he fucks? They kiss catfish out in Nashville, but no one seems to want to discuss that.”

“Yeah,” Kent laughs, relief momentarily allowing him a minute to breathe. “What is up with that? We should ask Ruben.”

A Latvian accent filters across the room, “Ask me what?”

“Why do you suck face with fish out in Tennessee?”

“I don’t know. I’m from Riga. We usually only kiss people there.”

There are no familiar faces in the stands for this game, and Kent skates a few quick laps before he heads over to the red line to stretch, dropping to his knees beside Linsky and feeling his hamstrings burn as he stretches his legs from side to side. Across the ice, Augustin and Smitty are taking snap shots at Scraps, the thunk of rubber hitting pad echoing over the ice. Kent watches the motion of Augustin's shot: pull, aim, release, follow through, a refined system of muscles and tendons that sends the puck hurtling directly into Scraps’ glove.

“Hello, Earth to Kent Parson?”

He turns to see Jack on one knee, grinning shiftily at him from the other side of the red line. “Oh, hey Zimms. Sorry.”

Jack’s laughing at him for some reason, Kent recognizes the way that his nose is crinkled and his mouth’s playfully mocking twist. His stomach turns over.

Jack begins stretching as well, snickering slightly, “How’s the season been for you so far?”

“About as good as yours,” Kent comments, since they’re both swimming around the lower middle of their respective conferences. The Falconers suffered a rash of injuries at the end of last season, and their current roster is peppered with a bunch of AHL call ups struggling to earn their sea legs. Jack raises both of his eyebrows.

“Yours might be going better than mine.” He says purposefully, “I saw the games.”

Kent swallows bile, which sits sour in the back of his throat, and pastes on a boastful smile. “Yeah? You liking my points streak?”

“Sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Jack grins that stupid grin again. Kent’s used to being the one in on the joke, not the one on the receiving end of it. His heartbeat snags on his ribs with every pulse. He props himself up on one knee to be on even footing, which of course means that Jack stands.

“How’s your investigation?” he asks. Kent has to blink up at him a few times before he remembers his ill-advised phone call.

“Stalled out.”

“Maybe for the best. You know,” Jack says purposefully, “Next time you’re in Providence, you should get dinner with me and Eric, and our friends Shitty and Lardo. Do you remember-”

“Mustache and Cup Pong,” Kent says, shuddering slightly at the memory of the latter. He’s never lost that badly in his life up until this season. “Yeah, I remember, but honestly, I really don’t feel like fifth-wheeling.”

That’s putting it mildly: he’d rather eat off his own foot than crash a double date featuring his ex-best-friend and maybe-ex-boyfriend, his maybe-ex-boyfriend’s fiance who hates him, his ex-best-friend’s current best friend, and that guy’s girlfriend, the person who beat his ass so badly at cup pong that he’s scared to go to a house party ever again. It actually sounds like his own personal circle of Hell.

“Well,” Jack says purposefully, “It doesn’t have to be fifth-wheeling-”

Kent tunes out, hearing the hasty scrape of someone skating at full speed growing louder. Jack cuts himself off, eyes widening as they turn to see who’s coming towards them.

“Oh, shit,” Kent mutters just before snow from Augustin’s sharp stop covers half his face. He wipes it off with a glove and wonders, to God or anybody else, what the hell he’s done to deserve this. There’s snow in his ear. People spit on this snow.

"Ça va?" Augustin says casually over Kent's head. Jack doesn't smile, but he's not frowning either. His shoulder lifts in a shrug.

"Pas mal. Vous avez été bon pour lui, vous savez."

"Aw, Zimmermann, est-ce de la jalousie que j'entends?"

"De vos points? Ouais. Mais, je suis heureuse pour les deux." Jack's smiling conspiratorially now, and Kent still has no idea why, but the language barrier certainly isn’t helping. "Si tu lui brises le cœur, je te tuerai."

"Vous vous amusez à perdre" Augustin calls as Jack skates away without a farewell. “Puts the Jack in jackass, doesn’t he?”

"What the hell?" Kent asks. He really needs to get his hands on a French-to-English dictionary in the near future. "What did he say?"

"He was giving me a, uh…shovel talk, I think is the English term. I told him to have fun losing." Augustin shakes his head, "I guess he wasn't able to give Genie the talk, eh? Had to settle for me."

Kent’s not entirely sure he’s on solid ground. “Nah, seriously, what exactly did he say?”

“Euh, that he's jealous of our points total, that he's happy for us, and that if I break your heart, he'll kill me.” Augustin shrugs, “Which, you know, he'll have to catch me first. American monolingualism is a curse, Parson. Learn another language.”

Kent feels his blood go cold as Augustin skates away.

Jack gave Augustin a shovel talk. Jack gave Augustin a shovel talk, and made faces, brought up Bittle and double-dates, and kept laughing at Kent, because Jack thinks that Kent and Augustin are dating.

He almost turns around to go grab Jack by the scruff of the neck and break his fucking nose when warm-ups end and he’s being called off the ice by the coaches. He stews in his own fucking juices about it for the entire pre-game, to the point where Cross comes over to ask him why “your fucking face looks like that?”

“We’re fucking winning this game,” he grinds out through his teeth. Cross blinks at him.

“Yeah, okay.”

They go out onto the ice, and when Jack and Kent face off, Jack’s smile falters at the glare Kent aims at him as he tries to explode Jack’s head with his mind. Which is unfortunate, considering that he’s so busy glaring that he whiffs the face-off and gives the Falconers first possession.

After their first shift, which amounts to a big fat load of nothing, Augustin wallops Kent in the back of the head so hard that Kent almost spits out his mouthguard.

“If you wanna learn French so bad, I can teach you, but otherwise stop fucking moping and shit. I thought you wanted to win.”

Kent looks over to tell Augustin to mind his own damn business, and his voice dries up in his throat like a raisin in the sun when he sees that Augustin’s not smiling—he never smiles unless he scores—but he’s got something like humour glinting in his eyes. Kent can’t help it. From the pits of fucking despair, he smiles back.

“Scraps taught me some Italian. It’s basically the same thing.”

“Ugh,” Augustin shakes his head. “You’re the fucking worst.”

The next shift they have, Kent’s the fucking worst and still pissed to high heaven, but at least he’s a hell of a lot more productive.

Augustin’s been shit-disturbing all period long, and it’s towards the end that he does it a little too loudly (and possibly in Russian) to Alexei Mashkov. He’s average height for a hockey player, if not skinnier than most of them, but next to Mashkov he looks like a branch about to snap in a tornado. That’s probably why when Mashkov goes after him and the puck, Smitty flies in and blatantly interferes with his path, drawing a penalty.

“Fuck off!” Smitty yells as the whistle goes, and Augustin abandons the puck to wheel back around. He grins cheekily at Mashkov even though they’re about to play shorthanded, but Kent’s too busy trying to bargain with the referee to tell him to knock it off.

“I get you next time,” he hears Mashkov threaten as he skates back to the bench.

“Oh, heavens to Betsy,” Augustin trills back without a beat of hesitation, pretending to clutch his pearls. Kent snorts at that, and then has to explain to the unamused ref that he wasn’t laughing at the penalty or the officiating. His chances of waiving the penalty vanish like smoke.

“What’s the plan?” Augustin asks as Kent skates by on their way to the face-off.

“Don’t let them score.”

“Hm,” Augustin mutters, something brewing in his eyes, “I think we can do better than that.”

There’s a look Kent’s come to notice, that specific combination of set mouth and contracted brow that means that Augustin is plotting something completely ludicrous, and his excitement sparks against his will. A captain’s supposed to be rational and logical, but Kent’s never claimed to be a particularly rational or logical guy, and there’s about a minute left in the first period. If there’s any time to do something stupid, it’s now.

“I think Augustin’s going to break form,” he warns Allie and Frisk as they fall into penalty kill formation. Frisk sighs.

“Doesn’t he always?”

“You enable him,” Allie says, but he’s smiling, so Kent just winks as he glides over to the faceoff. He can see Jack preparing to jump the boards the moment that the Aces attempt to ice the puck, and Jack’s line is dangerous on the powerplay. He wonders, as he wins the face-off and knocks it to Frisk, if he was mistaken in letting Augustin off his leash.

But then Augustin gets the puck from Frisk and is off like a rocket between the two Falconers defensemen, and has three people scrambling after him. He takes a weak shot that bounces off Snow’s padding, and hounds the defenseman who scoops it up, one of the AHL call-ups, so doggedly that the kid panics and ices the puck just before Jack can get on the ice.

“What the fuck?” is all Kent can say as he skates over after the whistle, and then, “are you fucking okay?” because Augustin looks like he’s about to pass out. Augustin nods, chest heaving.

“We gotta score,” he huffs, and jerks his head to where Jack is still standing uselessly on his bench, “Quickly.”

“Yeah, before you die,” Kent grunts, lining up. Augustin nods, face blotchy and waxen. He coughs sharply.

“I'm gonna go stand over there.”

“Face-off in the Falconers end, with no change thanks to an icing, so the Falcs’ usual powerplay line remains confined to the bench. Parson wins it to- Berenger SCORES! A beautiful one-timer off the face-off, Snow doesn’t even seem to know where the puck came from as the Aces score short-handed.”

They stumble back onto the bench after the stadium blows its fucking lid, Augustin dragging his feet through the doors.

“Ugh,” he grunts, and then throws up in a nearby garbage can. He waves apologetically at the equipment manager who leapt out of the way, “Sorry, Jim.”

“That’s what happens when you go end to end on the penalty kill,” Frisk mutters from three guys down, but he’s smiling and Allie is nearly shaking with excitement. Wilson leans in from his perch on the bench, patting Augustin on the shoulder.

“Great goal, Berenger. If you ever fucking do that again, you’re a healthy scratch in the next game.”

“Learned my lesson, coach,” Augustin grumbles, and then throws up again. Kent pats him on the back sympathetically. At least the buzzer mercifully rings and grants them ten minutes of time to catch their breath pretty soon after.

Hockey is a game of skill, but it’s also a game of psychology: that’s something Augustin seems to know better than a lot of people. One goal towards the end of the first period isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but the short-handed goal knocks the Falcs so off-kilter that they stumble through a chaotic second period, and barely regroup in the third for one goal against the four that the Aces put up.

Augustin plays slower than he typically does for the rest of the game, but that’s still about as fast as your regular player and in Kent’s mind, he’s already pulled his weight. They’re dead even now, in terms of their wager: thirty-six to thirty-six.

Now he has to start thinking about what he wants for winning. He has a few ideas.

He has to wait for Augustin to finish stretching his legs afterwards, a laborious process that forces him send the rest of the team ahead to the bar to meet some of the Falconers so that they don’t think another prank is being pulled on them.

“Can you hurry up?”

“We have a game in two days,” Augustin says. He’s still dressed in the dry-fit Aces undershirt and tight shorts, methodically warming down every cord of muscle in his admittedly impressive legs with careful precision. “I want to be able to play without wincing every three strides.”

Kent catches himself looking as Augustin’s lithe body contorts itself, and feels his face flush. Jack’s pre-game insinuations had been shunted to the back of his head for the purpose of beating the Falcs into the ground and putting their decapitated head on a stick to wave around, but now that there are no bodies to hit or no pucks to chase, he can hear Augustin’s paraphrased, off-handed comments ringing in his ears.

Jack is so fucking lucky that Augustin is straight, and that heterosexual hockey players wouldn’t know a fruit unless it was dietician-approved.

He has to set the record straight, that he and Augustin are just linemates, and Kent’s matured over the last few years, and that Jack can shove it so far up his fucking ass that it comes out his mouth. He has to do it now, before Jack’s caught up babysitting his drunk teammates, and he has to do it before the strip of skin between Augustin’s shirt and shorts gives him a minor coronary.

“Dude! I’m decaying here.”

“Merde, you’re such a fucking yapper.”

The Falconers-Aces post-game bar night is a tradition entirely facilitated by Scraps and Mashkov, who bonded at the Olympics while Kent wasn’t looking and now collectively force their teams to come out together except for that one really awkward game two years ago. Kent’s glad that for all his and Jack’s bullshit, nothing else has yet to come between Scraps and Mashkov’s weird cross-continental bond that would solve world peace and make Joseph McCarthy cry.

It also gives him a chance to immediately corner Jack at the other end of the bar, in plain sight of everyone, and yell at him under the cover of the throbbing music pouring out of the speakers.

“Kent,” Jack says, eyes guarded when he realizes that Kent is both blocking him off from the rest of his team, and that his eyebrow is twitching madly. Kent doesn’t really give a fuck what Jack is thinking right now. If he did, it would probably piss him off more.

“Everyone says I’m the one that shoots my mouth off, but you’re worse than me, and no amount of your aristocratic French-Canadian courtesy bullshit can hide it.”

“Kent-”

“You made it very clear, for a very long time, that you wanted nothing to fucking do with me,” Kent hisses, quiet enough that no one but Jack can hear. “Fine, you’re a different person now, but you can’t just decide one day that you get to comment on my life again. You lost that right when I saved your fucking life by clawing pills out of your mouth and then you didn’t talk to me for a year.”

“Kent, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Augustin. We aren't dating,” he snarls, "You're fucking lucky he's straight and doesn't know what the fuck is going on. What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you even think for a minute about what might have happened if you were wrong?"

It’s a rhetorical question. Jack Zimmermann never assumes he’s wrong.

"Shit, Kenny. I shouldn't have assumed. It's my fault." he says, in that miraculous way of his that is both conciliatory and standoffish. “I just…”

If Kent could reach out and start strangling him without getting smashed into a pulp by Sebastien St. Martin and Randall Robinson, who are eyeing them suspiciously from the tables that the Aces have commandeered, he would. “You just what?”

Jack seems like he wants to forget that he ever intended to say anything, which is so fucking typical, but he surprises Kent by taking a deep breath and saying, “I just want you to be happy, Kent. I was hoping you were, at least in that way, and I got ahead of myself. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause any problems.”

Kent can feel that he’s heaving for breath, and reins it in, slowly inhaling and exhaling in longer and longer pulls. His hands, clenched on top of the wooden bartop, begin to unfurl, pressing flat against cheap varnish. “Look. You have made it very clear that we now live very different lives. Fine. I’m coming to terms with that. But I’m not the same kid I was in Rimouski, and you can’t just-”

“Sometimes, you still play like him.” Jack says haltingly, ducking his head, “You just…I didn’t think I’d see it again, is all.”

“Jack…” Kent has to bite back a choked noise. “Don’t fucking say that shit.”

At least he has the decency to look ashamed. “I’m sorry, Kenny. I just meant that you actually play like you’re having fun again. Like this is a game, and not a war.”

Jack and his fucking war metaphors. Kent really thought they would have gone away. His fucking degree in it has clearly only made it worse and more prevalent.

“I can’t live your life,” Kent says quietly, and Jack shuts his mouth with a snap, “If it’s the life you want, far be it from me to criticize you for it, but I can’t live your life. Don’t try to make me.”

They made that mistake once, but they were eighteen back then, and the lines blurred too far and they had too much arrogance to believe that the world wouldn’t chew them into gristle and spit them out. Now they’re twenty-five and there’s no excuses to be made. And besides, what Kent’s really saying is this: you have somebody, and I have nobody. I can’t do this alone. And they both know it.

Jack nods once, eyes sad, and smiles wryly. Kent sighs, propping his forehead on his fingers as the fight leaves his body all at once.

“An apology from Jack Zimmermann,” he says, only mostly joking, “Are the pigs flying?”

It’s nowhere near the nicest thing he could have said, but Jack just seems relieved that he’s not going to keep the fight going. “Must be, seeing as you won tonight.”

“Har har,” Kent cocks his head towards their rowdy group. “We should go back to the table before St. Martin and Mashkov think I’m holding you at gunpoint.”

Jack sticks his hands up in mock surrender, and Kent snorts as they make their way back towards the party.

Other than some disgruntled chirping between the younger Aces and Falconers who don’t yet know how to act, the night is pretty genial. Mashkov and Scraps are leaning against each other talking excitedly about some video game or other, leading rounds and rounds of beer and shots, and even Augustin’s found a friend in Dustin Snow.

“Fuck, dude,” Snowy is saying as Kent slides into the booth next to Augustin. “That fucking clapper, I swear, I didn’t even see it.”

“Eyeliner,” Augustin suggests with the air of someone who has done so many times before, pointing to his own eyes. “Reduces the glare.”

“Makes you look hot, too,” Snowy adds, and Kent’s appalled when instead of chirping him like he would if Kent said that, Augustin just ducks his head with a laugh.

“As if this guy needs any more of an ego boost, Snow,” he retorts. “You might need one, though, after the game you had.”

A couple of the younger Falcs glare at him, but Snowy just grins incorrigibly and orders another beer. “Never change, Parson.”

The bar is dark and hot, and Kent can feel sweat collecting in the well of his clavicle as the night goes on. He’s starting to stifle yawns so no one chirps him about being an old man, and only has one beer, in case Augustin decides to disappear tonight to make up for dragging Kent through the night before. But Augustin stays where he is, sandwiched between Kent and Snowy, nursing a glass of water whose ice cubes have long since melted away.

Unlike his usual wallflower schtick, he’s a sharp-tongued star of the show tonight. The young Falcs prod him about the end-to-end play, even the defenceman he pushed into panicking. He manages to make Mashkov and the Falcs veterans snort with his verbal dressing-down of some of the less well-liked hockey pundits. Kent watches, mesmerized, as he bears witness to some sort of evolved reincarnation of Augustin’s rookie self: all the snark and wit, sharpened and hardened with time, so at ease that nothing could shake him.

He feels like a killjoy when he leans over during a lull and asks, “hey, Gus, what time do you wanna get outta here?”

“What?” Augustin asks, leaning in closer so he can hear Kent speak. His wavy hair is loose around his face, and there’s still black clinging to his waterline and long eyelashes. Up this close, Kent can see that his dark brown eyes have flecks of amber in them. In the dim light, they form a ring of gold around the pupil.

“I said-”

He can smell eucalyptus from Augustin’s hair, sharp and clear, as he extends an arm around Kent’s shoulders to flip off Mashkov about something, teeth bared in a feral grin. The side of his torso brushes against Kent’s arm, warm and solid.

Something clicks into place.

Oh, fuck.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes. The floor drops away.

Even Augustin doesn’t hear as he says something undoubtedly nasty to St. Martin in French, their conversation steadily devolving from polite France-French to loud, sniping Quebecois slang. Kent looks up at Jack, who’s staring at him from the bar with a considering face. There must be something in his expression when he looks up, because Jack’s typically stoic expression collapses into something deeply sympathetic. He raises his glass to Kent, almost in commiseration.

The realization is brutal enough. Compounded by the fact that Jack read him better than he read himself, even after so long, it’s agonizing.

His phone dings.

Zimms: It’s okay. It happens to the best of us.

“What does?”

Kent slams his phone face-down on the table so hard that the glasses rattle. His heartbeat is in his throat. “Nothing. Stop fucking doing that.”

Augustin’s face is deadpan. “Yeah, okay. Wanna get out of here?”

“Yeah,” Kent hears himself say, “You gotta drive, though.”

He’s only had one beer, but he’s lightheaded enough from other things that it doesn’t really matter. Augustin doesn’t complain, just takes the keys and bids the Falconers farewell. He’s wearing his leather jacket today instead of his wool coat, and it gleams in the glow of the streetlamps as they make their way towards Kent’s car. Augustin’s whistling a jaunty tune.

Kent’s entire world, on the other hand, is imploding.

All of his fucking posturing to Jack about being different people and doing different things, and here he is, smack dab in the middle of the same damn place he started. A tall, beautiful boy with dark hair driving him home from a hockey game late at night, where they spent sixty minutes dominating their opponents together, playing what Kent believes to his very core will be remembered as the best hockey of their lives, something they’ll play together for the rest of their lives.

Some people would say that Kent has a type. Kent would say that he has a curse.

Steps one through four of a team’s rebuild are tangible actions made using logic and insight. Step five is the toss of a coin in a well, and a cross of fingers, the sheer force of belief that you’re not only doing the right thing, but that everyone else around you is doing what you need them to do, without them knowing. In essence, it’s blind faith.

Kent is not a toss-a-coin-in-a-well type of guy.

Oh God, his mom is going to murder him.

“Hey.”

“Hm?” He turns to see that Augustin is looking at him funny. He struggles to keep his breathing even under the probing gaze, and to say something suitable is even harder, “I know I’m handsome, but you gotta buy me dinner before you take me home, Gus.”

Augustin rolls his eyes and hits the car’s ‘off’ button. “And here I was about to ask you what was wrong. Again. You’re just chock full of fucking problems today, Parson.”

Kent resists the urge to say something along the lines of if only you knew. “What’s wrong is that you look like a 1950s greaser, and you were fraternizing with the enemy.”

“Dustin?” Augustin’s face grows guarded, “I already know Dusty.”

Kent feels his stomach swoop, “You’re friends?”

“Strong word,” Augustin grunts, any glimpse of the night’s positive emotion sublimated into thin air, “We’re…we know of each other. But we had very dissimilar experiences.”

He gets out of the car before Kent can press further, and Kent ambles after him, feeling dazed and sore and half out of his mind, because all he can think as they ride the elevator up and then bid each other a quiet goodnight, is that he has somehow found himself in a world where he can’t imagine living any other way. In just two months, he has become irrevocably changed, and he didn’t even fucking notice.

There’s nothing in the whole fucking world he fears more than that.

That night, he lies awake listening to Augustin call his sister, and clings to his only saving grace: whatever he feels for Augustin, he doesn’t think it’s love yet. There’s still time to change. There’s still time to be saved.

Notes:

nooooo not my vancouver canucks. i'm so proud of them and i love them so dearly (they played SO BADLY last night)

is this anything? idk. really debated whether or not to keep the "fruit" line but it did numbers with the one person i read it out loud to so i kept it

Chapter 9

Summary:

In which Kent follows official NHL concussion protocol, Augustin represses some more, and the Boston Bruins are the worst fucking team ever

Midway through their game against Boston, Augustin’s carrying the puck up the boards when he hears the crunch. Before it fully registers, he thinks, wow, that sounds like it hurt.

He realizes who was behind him one second after the referee blows his whistle.

When Augustin was thirteen, his sister was the first of her friends to get her drivers license. He had snuck into her car one summer night when she went to pick up her friends for a bonfire, intent on surprising her, only to shock her so badly that she drove off the shoulder of the highway and crashed into a ditch.

The feeling of scrambling out of the truck’s cab and around to the front seat to see if his sister was alive was the coldest that he, a boy raised in rural Quebec winters, had ever been until tonight.

Injuries are a part of hockey: Augustin has taken pucks to the jaw, sticks to the eye. He lost a tooth once, and it was lucky that they found it and put it in a cup of milk so a dentist could jam it back in. He’s been on injured reserve more than once in his career: a fucked up wrist from a slash, and a fractured ankle from taking a 95 mile-per-hour rubber bullet to the leg. But the team will patch you up and put you back out, and everything turns out okay unless it doesn’t.

Injuries are a part of hockey, and usually they’re not too scary. But sometimes, arenas of twenty-thousand people will go deathly silent, and that’s when the dread sets in.

Kent lies flat on the ice, curled in on himself, as Smitty grabs the offending Bruin by the neck and wrestles him to the ground. Augustin can see from here that his eyes are dazed, and that there’s blood sprayed across his visor, red and dripping onto the ice. His vision goes white: one minute he’s standing next to the puck, and the next he’s knelt at Kent’s side. The time in between has vanished like it never existed. He can feel walls closing in.

“Parson? Hey, Kent, Kent, look at me.”

Who the fuck is speaking? Whoever it is is an idiot for telling Kent, whose face is bleeding from a gash on his cheekbone and can’t focus his gaze, to move his neck. He turns to yell at that person, and then realizes that the desperate moron is him.

“Shit,” he breathes, because Kent actually tries to twist his head down to look at him like he asked, “No, don’t turn your neck, don’t move, fuck.”

“You’re sending mixed fuckin’ signals, Gus,” Kent mutters, voice tight and slightly slurred. The first person to get to him is the Bruins trainer, followed quickly by the Aces one, and a hand has to tug him away to give them room to work.

“Fuck,” he whispers as Allie pulls him forcefully away from Kent by the neck of his jersey. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

He makes the mistake of looking up at the jumbotron, which is replaying a video of the hit. He feels the blood leave his face: the Bruins player is twice Kent’s size, crushing Kent’s stick against his face as he shoves Kent into the boards at a perpendicular, skating at full speed with no attempt to stop. Kent drops like a stone, blood already splattering the ice before his body hits the ground.

The offending player is being escorted to the penalty box, and Allie has to catch Augustin by the shoulders to stop him from going after the guy.

“Hey, hey!” The cheerful Swede’s voice is uncharacteristically sharp, “Gus, stop.”

He stops so he can turn and rip Allie a new asshole, but over Allie’s shoulder, Kent struggles himself to standing. He’s hunched in on himself, but he’s skating off the ice on his own with a cloth pressed to his bleeding face. He shoots the crowd a thumbs up as he stumbles off the ice, and Augustin feels relief flood him as they cheer. It’s so sharp and so fast that he forgets to even tap his stick, or check in on Kent, or do anything that a normal teammate would do.

The relief fades quickly into bitter fear and acrid anger the second that Kent’s shoulders disappear down the tunnel.

Before the game, Kent said something along the lines of: “Don't take any stupid penalties.”

So naturally, immediately after he's escorted off the ice to get his face stitched up and evaluated for a concussion, Augustin has an exchange with a referee that goes something like this:

Augustin: He fucking tried to kill Parson, how could you not call a game misconduct?
Zebra: Cool it, and tell your alternates to do the negotiating.
Augustin: Negotiating? You're fucking lucky he's still alive!
Zebra: Any more out of you and you're going in the box.
Augustin: Fucking put me in the box then, you fucking asshole

And then he gets two minutes for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Cross and Troy are as pissed as he is by the eventual outcome, which is a minor penalty for charging, and he can see them swearing about it as they pass him by. He’s essentially negated their man advantage, and now he has to stew in a glass cage for the next two minutes planning on how to murder the guy in the other box.

And then the Bruins score, which leads to him smashing his stick over the bench and yelling viciously at every single white and yellow jersey that passes the box. This leads to another two minutes for him, and the referee warning him that if he pulls anything else he’ll be ejected from the game.

The period ends before his second penalty does, and he slinks into the dressing room late thanks to the distance. It’s silent in there. Kent’s absence is a physical presence in its own right, a gaping black hole sucking the light and energy out of the room. Wilson’s late coming in, likely checking on his star player before he can give them the news.

“Is it a concussion?” Smitty asks the second a coach appears in the room. It’s the defensemen’s coach, Gaglardi. He shakes his head.

“We don’t know, his initial evaluation is dancing the line, but he’s done for the night.”

There’s a rustle of discontent, a shadow falling across the room as the clouds blot out the sun. Anger fills the back of his throat with the tang of metal as he sees the fight leave his teammates bodies, as if Kent’s injury has somehow taken their will to live out of them.

“So what?”

Everyone turns to look at him, eyes wide and shocked. Augustin knows his voice is dry and emotionless, because he’s made it that way over the years and now he has trouble turning it all the way off. A couple of the guys glaring at him through troubled eyes.

“What do you mean, so what?” Makela asks darkly. Augustin opens his mouth, and it's not until he’s speaking like a waterfall tumbling out of his mouth that he realizes how much Kent has dulled his edges without him noticing. But Kent’s not here.

“So fucking what? One guy’s out and that’s it? We’re all just gonna weep and fucking roll over and let the Bruins bury us? That’s fucking embarrassing.”

“It’s Parse you’re talking about,” Ruben says harshly, his accent not disguising his disdain for Augustin’s words. “Why the fuck are you being so…”

“Callous?” Troy offers, but not in agreement. He’s got something in his eye, a look that Cross is matching. Augustin shakes his head, standing up and pulling on his jersey. He doesn’t have time for their weird leadership team spirit shit, and he doesn’t have time for a bunch of grown men pouting about their star player’s absence like he’s dead. What kind of retribution is that?

“Whatever,” he scoffs, tucking in the back so his number is partially obscured and grabbing his gloves. “I’m not going to sit here and mope about Parson’s injury and give the Bruins any fucking satisfaction. We have a game to win.”

Cross comes up behind him as he waits in the tunnel for the go-ahead, listening to the team gather themselves and Troy leading a rousing call to arms. He doesn’t hear the footsteps until a gloved hand lands on his shoulder.

“New lines,” Cross says quietly, “You’re going to play center to Smitty and Petal.”

Augustin nods, feeling as if the air has become thick as clay. Wilson’s making him the starting center, the one that calls the shots and directs the play. The pressure of it bears down on his spine. How the fuck is he supposed to take Kent’s place? Kent’s been their leader for years, and Augustin just bawled them out right after he was carted off.

See, what they don’t tell you about when you put skates on for the first time at four years old is that the obverse of playing good fucking hockey is carrying the weight of the team on your shoulders.

“This is so fucked,” he mutters, and if Cross hears him, he doesn’t show it.

“Hey, Gus?”

“Yeah?”

Cross smiles grimly at him, “Don’t take any more stupid penalties.”

Oliver Bloom’s nickname is Petal not simply because of his last name, but because he can accelerate, pedal to the metal, like no one Augustin’s ever seen. The only reason they haven’t played together is because you can’t have two left-wingers on the same line unless one of them becomes the center.

Augustin's been dreading the day he has to play with Bloom for a while now.

“Gus,” Bloom says as he catches up to Augustin on his way back to the penalty box. “You know that we got your back, right? Me and Smitty? I’ve been watching.”

He’s twenty years old, and looking for reassurance. Augustin doesn’t know how to give that, so he just says, “I know,” because he does. “Take the face-off.”

“But Coach said-”

“Smitty can do it against the other three centers, but not that one. Take the face-off.”

Bloom grins at him as he gets into the box, and wins the starting face-off by launching himself at the Bruins center. They successfully run down the remaining twenty-seven seconds of Augustin’s penalty without much incident, essentially playing keepaway with the puck, which is exactly what Augustin wants.

“Berenger out of the box, calling for the puck, bats down a high pass from Ahlgren, and look at that speed, the Bruins are not going to catch him- he SCORES! Thirty-one seconds into the second period, after four minutes in the box, Berenger evens the score!”

“What a goal from Augustin Berenger. You have to wonder if Parson can hear this crowd from the dressing room, which he hasn’t returned from since he took that hit last period.”

He doesn’t feel joy as he puts the puck so firmly in the back of the net that the top of the water bottle hanging in the back pops off. Just feels a simmering sense of dark satisfaction. The Bruins are going to lose this game, and they’re going to lose by a lot.

The rest of the game is a blur, and Augustin makes sure to use every advantage that his line has: Smitty’s size, Bloom’s speed, Allie and Frisk’s passing ability. They follow his directions avidly as he points around the ice before faceoffs, as if he’s giving a lecture on the meaning of life and not drawing lines in the air. He loses far more faceoffs than he wins, but it doesn’t matter, because the Aces are dominating the ice even when he’s not on it, even when Kent’s not on it.

He keeps looking right expecting to see Kent only to spot Smitty or Bloom, but they make it work. He uses his own advantages too, successfully taunting half the Bruins roster into racking up a series of penalty minutes that lead to three power-play goals: one more from him, and one each for Harley and Makela.

The moment the game ends and they let him off the ice, he escapes to the med room only to find the team medic rolling up bandages alone. His stomach drops to hell, “Frank, where the hell is Parson?”

“They put him in a car back to his place,” Frank says, grinning widely at him. “Hell of a game, Gus, seriously. Parson refused to let them drive him home until it ended.”

Augustin blinks at him as the words penetrate his skull, “He just left?”

“Mr. Berenger,” someone says behind him, a member of the Aces staff, “You’re the first star, you need to go take your lap.”

“Fuck that, I-”

“Augustin,” Frank says, face collapsing sympathetically as he puts down his bandage roll. “Kent’s fine. They bandaged him up and he’s going to be at his apartment when you’re done.”

Augustin feels himself nod mutely, and follows the intern out of the medical room.

He’s the first one out of the dressing room, and he drives ten over the speed limit with white knuckles the whole way back to the apartment.

“He’s already up there,” Mike says cryptically when Augustin bursts out of the parking lot elevator and crosses the lobby in six strides. “Great game, Berenger.”

“This fucking lobby is too big,” he replies as the elevator doors close.

The apartment is dark, and Kent’s door is ajar, no lumpy silhouette visible in his bed. Augustin swears viciously as he hits the overhead light. He’s going to kill Mike and Frank-

“Oh, hey,” Kent says, from where he’s laying on the couch cuddling a massive ice-pack. He lifts his neck and squints down his nose at Augustin, “Can you turn those back off?”

“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Augustin snarls in a whisper, taking in the massive white lump taped to Kent’s cheekbone and the ice-pack he’s pressing against his chest. He hits the lights, leaving only the kitchen light on, “You couldn’t stay five more fucking minutes?”

“You were worried about me?” Kent asks with genuine fucking bemusement. Augustin was, but now he really just feels like punching Kent in the ribs again. “Hey, you played great without me.”

“I always play fucking great,” his feet shuffle uselessly by the door as Kent keeps looking at him with those huge grey-green eyes, his bruised eye socket starting to swell, “You look like shit.”

Kent’s head hits the couch with a muffled thud, and Augustin feels his heart lurch, “Crisse de calisse d’esti! Don’t fucking do that!”

“They’re making me stay awake for the night,” Kent says to the ceiling, “I’m not concussed, I don’t think. It’s just my ribs. They said it was okay to lie down as long as it was on my back, and I was gonna call Swoops to come over-”

“That’s fucking stupid,” Augustin says, kicking off his shoes. “I’m already here.”

Kent’s been weird for the last couple of days, and it shows when he sincerely says, “I didn’t want to inconvenience you.”

“You inconvenience me every goddamn day, stopping just because you’re injured is embarrassing.”

He sits on the couch by Kent’s head, and Kent smiles wanly up at him, his breathing laborious. The giant bandage on his cheekbone should be comical, but Augustin sees it and feels the urge to shoot and skin a bear. He reaches out to prod the outside of it, but Kent jerks away before Augustin can touch him, wincing at the sudden movement.

“You called your mom, right? And your sister?”

“My mom called me,” Kent’s face collapses into a grimace, “And when I didn’t pick up, she called Coach Wilson and Hollis before they put her through to Frank. I’m so fucking dead when I go home for Christmas.”

“I’ll weep at your funeral. Did you call Beth?”

“Yeah,” Kent says hoarsely, “She has a paper due tomorrow night, I told her to go the fuck to sleep. If I’m concussed, I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

“You’re not concussed,” Augustin says as if his decree will magically reverse any cerebral trauma Kent might have suffered. "Anything wrong with you was there long before you hit your head."

“I’m so fucking bored already,” Kent replies, his voice weak and weary. His hand flutters uselessly to where his phone sits on the coffee table, periodically buzzing with texts from the team and other names Augustin doesn’t recognize. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

“Right,” Augustin stands, giving Kent a gentle pat on the forehead, “Wait here.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kent scoffs tiredly as Augustin goes into his room and scours the shelves for something suitable to read. He’s not really a books person, but he spots Lord of the Rings and pulls it from the shelf. The movie is great, so the book should be at least pretty good.

“What are you doing?” Kent asks as Augustin settles back down, flipping open the book. He puts his free hand back onto Kent’s forehead, like he’s checking for a fever, and although Kent flinches at the touch, he eventually relaxes and shuts up momentarily.

“This book is largely concerned with Hobbits,” Augustin begins, “and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”

“Oh my fucking God,” Kent says faintly, “I think you’re trying to kill me.”

“Shut the fuck up, I have to tell you about the, uh...Red Book of Westmarch before we get to the good stuff, so stop fucking interrupting.”

He gets through about half of the book before the sun rises, and a couple chapters more before the alarm goes off on his phone reminding him that they need to get Kent to his next evaluation and ensure that he’s not actually concussed.

“I feel concussed,” Kent mumbles as he sits up with a wince, even though Augustin’s been forcing him to get up and walk around once an hour. “I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind.”

“Don’t fucking say that. If you’re concussed, you’re out for at least two weeks, maybe three. I hate winning by default.”

That’s what he says out loud, because he can’t admit that he doesn’t think he can face the Aeros alone again. He’s gotten too used to a team that actually plays with him, not around him, and to lose that just before he has to see that smug motherfucker they made captain and the awful navy-blue jerseys they wear-

He snaps a finger in front of Kent’s nose, “Stop dozing. Go put a jacket on.”

He drives Kent to the team neurologist’s office, yawning with every other breath as the sun rises over the desert. Kent has a little trouble walking, but he makes it into the elevator and up to the office without many problems. They force Augustin to wait in the waiting room with a sweet older receptionist named Jane who makes him coffee and pats his head.

“Wonderful game last night,” she tells him. “Sugar or cream?”

“No thanks,” Augustin says hoarsely, and mainlines the coffee in one go. Jane doesn’t comment, just brings him another small paper cup filled with dark, thin liquid. It tastes like battery acid. He swallows it in three this time.

After twenty minutes, the doctor’s door opens, and Kent comes out stone-faced.

“Shit,” Augustin mutters, too tired to stand up. His stomach was already aching from the coffee, and it’s nearly ripped itself in half by the time that Kent’s impatience wins and his stony face breaks into a sunny smile as he waves a white piece of paper.

“Oh, you fucking piece of shit asshole,” Augustin swears, rocketing to his feet, “You absolute motherfucker. You’re not concussed?”

“Language, Mr. Berenger,” Jane says from her desk. “This is a doctor’s office.”

“Nope,” Ken grins, “Just bruised ribs. My head remains as wonderfully handsome and healthy as it normally is.”

“So, fucked in all respects.” Augustin says, the words acting as a levee against the crashing waves of relief. “God, you’re such a fucking dick.”

“Five days upper-body,” Kent sing-songs as they make their way to the car, “More than I want, but it’s better than three weeks.”

“Five days of peace and fucking quiet in the dressing room,” Augustin retorts, and Kent rolls his eyes.

“You’ll miss me.” He jabs, and Augustin nearly jabs back that he will when he realizes it’s true. He will. He’ll miss Parson, and not just for his ability to read Augustin’s plays like an open book, either.

“Let’s get back to the apartment,” he says carefully instead as they pile back into the elevator. “I think we both need some fucking sleep.”

Five days is going to be okay. He can do five days, he thinks as he crashes into bed and passes out instantly.

And if he dreams about blond hair and eyes the colour of a sky before a thunderstorm, that’s nobody’s fucking business but his.

Notes:

"ollie who are you writing this for?" I'm writing this for the 4-6 people who leave me essay-length analyses in the comments this is for YOU and NOBODY ELSE

anyways. short filler chapter today because next chapter is a) long and b) uhhhhhhh have fun with it i guess

i also busted my elbow in my sleep which sucks because i have my second hockey game in the last three years tonight and i was already going to be bad BEFORE the elbow busted. dedicating this chapter to me losing this game for my team and also to my busted elbow womp womp

Update: we lost AND I threw up!!! Kent Parson I am not

Chapter 10

Summary:

in which Kent questions, Augustin fights, and we finally figure out what the hell happened with the Houston Aeros

Notes:

guys my elbow is fine i was just being a little bitch about it

It’s not fair to say that Kent rushed to improve in time to play the Houston Aeros. It is fair to say that he under-exaggerated his pain to the team doctors so that they would clear him a game earlier, and no one would question him being back in the lineup when the Aeros come to visit.

It’s just bruised ribs: he’s not stupid enough to actually risk his long-term physical health, but it still aches as he yanks himself tooth and nail through their away game against the Bluejackets, and he knows he’s not playing his best. He may have fooled most of the team, but Swoops and Scraps glare at him between periods as he swallows ibuprofen and Augustin cusses him out that night on the plane before throwing an ice pack at him once they get back to the apartment.

Augustin threw himself at someone on the ice who was trying to check Kent during the third period, and all Kent could think was hot. Clearly, he took a harder hit to the head than he thought.

He’s still trying to kill Kent, that much is for sure. From staying up all night reading Lord of the Rings to him, the cool, long-fingered hand settled protectively on Kent’s forehead, to the wary looks whenever Kent winces and the careful placement of the ice-pack on bare skin. Those are all clearly cleverly disguised assassination attempts from either Boston trying to finish the job, or Anaheim, who they’re currently jostling for a wild-card spot.

Somehow, Kent’s been finding his untimely demise to be unsuitably pleasant, but any pleasantness of the last few days disappears without a trace in the twelve hours between their return from Columbus and the day that they play the Aeros on home ice.

He knows that something’s wrong, even without his suspicions, when he gets up the morning of the Aeros game and someone’s making coffee in the kitchen, the old machine grinding its own gears as it churns out coffee darker than a desert night. He emerges from his room in a ratty old Rimouski sweatshirt and his flannel pajama pants to find Augustin already prepared for a run.

“Hey, uh, were you going to wake me?”

“You’re resting your ribs, you fucking masochist,” Augustin says, tone broaching no reproach and face utterly emotionless. His voice is almost robotic. “I’ll be back.”

And then he’s out the door, voluntarily going on a run at seven in the morning, the same man who routinely says that he would rather be waterboarded than do extra cardio. With the benefit of hindsight, Kent should have known that this was the first real hint that this is bad.

Augustin hides from pre-game media, and doesn’t talk to anyone past the cursory response to a greeting, which is par for the course. What’s not is that he re-tapes all four of his sticks twice before getting dressed, and yanks on a skate lace so hard that it breaks. Smitty and Ruben flinch when Augustin throws the broken lace into the garbage like he’s pitching a no-hitter, the clack of the aglet against the plastic bin sounding like a gunshot.

Swoops looks over at Kent as Augustin rethreads his skate boot and mouths: what’s his problem?

All Kent can do is shrug.

The captain of the Aeros for the last few years is Jason Kirby, who’s about five years older than Kent and a generally amiable guy who cares a lot about his team. They’re work friends, of a sort. Kent went to his wedding, they hang out during All-Star weekends when Kirby gets nominated, and their chirps in the heat of the moment never really progress past “your mom” and criticisms of plays and technique. Kent finds him stretching near the red line during warm ups, and skates over, dropping to his knees beside him.

“Hey, Parse,” Kirby says, stretching out his leg, “How are you, man? Are the ribs doing okay?”

“Are you asking because you want to see how hard to hit me?” He grins, because Kirby is six-foot-five and built like a tank. If Kent gets a hit from him like the one against Boston, he’s not entirely sure he’d survive, “Gently, if you’re taking requests.”

Kirby laughs. Luckily, he’s more of a gentleman, not one for charging small wingers, “Sure. Is this a courtesy call?”

“Something like that,” Kent replies genially, “Can you do me a solid?”

Kirby sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Other than hitting you gentler? Depends on what it is.”

“I want to make sure your guys don’t target Berenger.” There’s not many Aeros that played with Augustin left on the team after they went through their rebuild a couple years ago, but they all know that Augustin hates their team, and it appears from their glaring across the ice that the feeling is mutual.

“It’s fucking hockey,” Kirby says dryly, propping himself on one knee, “Berenger can’t cry to management every time something happens that he doesn’t like.”

Now that Kent's thinking about it, he can't remember if Kirby was pulled up from the Aeros farm team the year that Augustin was traded, or the year before.

“I’m not saying don’t rough him up,” he says, warning entering his voice, “I’m saying that if I catch anyone going after him more than normal, I’ll let Smith and Herlovsen off their leashes.”

Kirby regards him for a moment before getting to his feet. “Berenger’s working out pretty well for you, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, “Thanks for letting him go, even though you’ll be regretting it later.”

“Aw, don’t thank me yet,” Kirby replies, “Even if we lose, I don’t think I’ll be the one regretting anything.” He glides away, waving his stick over his shoulder, “Good luck, Parse.”

Kent skates back to his side with an inexplicable pit of dread in his gut. He finds Swoops and Cross and pulls them aside as the warm-up ends. “Cross, I’m gonna get you and Harley to play up with us. I’ll let Gaglardi know, but even if he doesn’t agree, see if you can try.”

“Why?” Cross asks, “Like, sure, but why?”

“I don’t know,” Kent replies honestly. “But I think we’re going to find out pretty quickly.”

The game starts, and maybe he doesn’t know what to expect: a lot more hits, some angry yelling, and a few nasty runs at Augustin while he has the puck. Things that are annoying, but easy to overcome.

He certainly doesn’t expect Augustin to play like shit.

It’s not just that he's distracted; Augustin could play better than half the league with a laser pointer flashing in his eye. No, he’s playing stupid, aggravated, angry hockey. It’s the same kind of hockey he played during the second period of their first game together, dialed up to a far worse extreme. Pucks hop over his stick blade, his passes fly into the middle of nowhere at best and into the sticks of the Aeros at worst, and the Aeros get a goal off of one of his turnovers to open the scoring. It’s some of the worst hockey Kent’s ever seen in his life.

“Crisse de câlice de tabarnak d'esti de sacrament de trou viarge!” Augustin shouts after the goal as Kent goes to tap Scraps’ pad in consolation, and breaks his stick against the goalpost. Scraps’ eyes widen.

“Uh-”

“Yeah,” Kent says grimly as he goes to talk down the referee from giving Augustin a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. Again. “I know.”

Wilson has no choice but to sit Augustin for a shift for his outburst, and puts Kent and Smitty out with Petal. The Aeros score again during that shift, off of a truly unfortunate sequence of mediocre passes, and Augustin breaks a second stick against the boards. Wilson sits him for the shift after that in response, though he says nothing else about it, just presses his lips tightly together.

“What the fuck is going on?” Cross asks as the period winds down. He’s been with Kent’s line as promised, but Augustin hasn’t even been out there often enough to be pushed around much more than usual. Kent can only shake his head, because what the fuck does he know? Augustin won’t tell him anything that matters.

Between periods, no one will touch Augustin with a ten-foot pole, as if they think the sweat clinging to his skin is venomous. His face is emotionless, blank as a piece of paper, but the rage that rolls off of him is so palpable that it enforces a demilitarized zone around his stall. Kent remembers that fire they tossed the sand over the night before the Providence game, and he can see the fuse burning almost at its end. It’s not a matter of if, only a matter of when.

“Gus-” he tries for the sake of everyone, as they’re about to start the second period, “What-”

Augustin smacks his hand away and stands, “occupez-vous putain d’vos affaires.”

Kent watches him stalk back to the bench, stepping back onto the ice with a volcanic grimace on his mouth.

‘When’ comes five minutes into the second period. There’s a scrum in front of the Aeros net after a messy deflection attempt by Smitty where his skate clipped the goalie and caused him to fall over. Augustin spends most of it exchanging words with the Aeros defencemen, nasty insults far beyond his typical chirps. Deeply personal, fucking mean insults, flavoured with some form of “go on, hit me, see what fucking happens.”

Kent tries to end the scrum by dragging Smitty away by the back of the jersey, only to get shoved by an overenthusiastic Aeros player and nearly fall, starting the whole thing back up. He makes the tactical error of trying to get Smitty again, who’s shoving at three Aeros at once while Frisk and Allie try to jump in, so he misses Augustin coming face to face with Kirby when the former tries to smack the Aeros’ mouthy rookie, Rathers.

“Going after a rookie? You’re still such a fucking pussy,” he hears Kirby sneer at Augustin, and he can only watch in horror something in Augustin’s carefully controlled face snaps.

His stick hits the ice with a clatter, and his gloves follow, obscured by the roar of the crowd. He shouts, “Drop your fucking gloves, Kirby!”

Kent can’t stop the fight that breaks out. One of the newer Aeros, Mitsuya, grabs him by the jersey and tows him away as Kirby and Augustin whale on each other. Nobody else is fighting, although the Aeros are cheering their captain on. Their cries aren’t jubilant for long.

“What the fuck?” Kent hears Smitty say, and for a moment, he echoes the sentiment. This is more than adrenaline boiling over. Augustin looks like he’s actively trying to kill Kirby, and Kirby’s saying something through bloodstained teeth that’s making Augustin hit even harder. It’s a bloodbath. If Kirby wasn’t built like a brick shithouse, he would be out cold on the ice, and Kent’s not sure even that would have stopped Augustin.

“Shit,” Mitsuya says, utterly bewildered as Augustin wrestles Kirby to the ground, “What the hell is going on?”

The refs grapple the two players once they catch onto what everyone else on the ice has already noticed: Augustin has broken Kirby’s nose, and doesn’t seem to want to stop there. It’s a miracle they manage to pull him away, and Kirby staggers upright, hunched in on himself, his blood dripping onto the ice until a medic comes to cup a towel around it. They escort both players off the ice immediately, and Augustin’s frame disappears stoically into the shadowed tunnel to the roar of the crowd.

Mitsuya looks shaken as he releases Kent, and Kent turns to him, patting him once on the shoulder, “You did good, kid. Way to defend your team.”

“Thanks, Mr. Parson,” the kid says, and they part ways as the referees confer by the penalty box. Kent doesn’t even try to plead Augustin’s case, since the Aeros alternate is out for blood, so he spends most of his time trying to bargain off Smitty’s half-hearted jabs at his own Aero when they all paired off, and pointing out that Kirby verbally instigated.

“Aeros number 19, Jason Kirby, is assessed a game misconduct,” the referee finally announces to the crowd after a few minutes of negotiating, “Aces number 7, Augustin Berenger, is assessed a match penalty for instigating and intent to injure.”

Kent feels his head hit his glove as the crowd boos. A match penalty means they’ll play shorthanded for five minutes. The entire bench is like a morgue when he returns to see what the hell Wilson wants him to do, what the hell they should argue to get them out of this hole. Wilson just shakes his head.

“Troy, Rubenis, get out there. Smith, you’re in the box.”

They lose tremendously. Smitty scores a goal and so does Flicker on the third line, but they’re shitty garbage goals and the rest of the team is so shaken by the fight and the shifting of lines to accommodate Augustin’s absence that they can’t properly defend against the Aeros. The game finishes with an embarrassing 5-2 loss.

Afterwards, Kent stands in the hallway and gives the most inane answers to the media that he can, until they get to the fight.

“What do you think the fight between Berenger and Kirby had to do with the loss?”

He resists the urge to bite the woman’s head off, because as far as journos go, she’s actually pretty good at her job. And this is part of the job. “I mean, it’s always hard to uh…bounce back from a major. I think, uh, Berenger’s a great player for us and it was hard to lose him so early in the game.”

Augustin’s not in the dressing room when he gets there, and all his things are neatly packed away. His jersey hangs in the alcove, and it has a bloodstain on the cuff. All at once, rage seizes control of Kent’s limbs, and he throws his helmet at the ground, where it lands with a loud crack. Bloom and Allie jump at the sound.

“Fuck!”

He hates losing, and he hates losing this badly, and he hates not knowing why. They can beat the Aeros, and they should have. They should have beaten the fucking Aeros, and instead Augustin’s missing in action, and all his teammates are looking at Kent like he lost his mind.

“Kent,” Swoops says gently, standing from his place. Kent ignores him, throwing his gloves too. The rest of the team bolts for the showers, Cross and Scraps shepherding them away as Swoops edges closer to him like he’s a feral dog.

“What?” he snaps. Swoops puts his hands up.

“I dunno. You seem upset.”

“You’re not fucking funny. Where the fuck is he?”

“He already left,” Swoops tells him, humour evaporating as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “They put him in a car back to your place after they treated his hand. Nothing’s broken, but a couple of knuckles might be fractured, the swelling needs to go down before they can check. There’ll be a hearing in the next couple of days to see if he gets suspended, which he will.”

Kent sits on the bench and starts stripping out of his gear, throwing it rather than setting it down neatly so that it bounces all over the place. Swoops watches until Kent gets to his skates, and then asks: “Did you know?”

“Know?” Kent hears his voice break, but he’s so far past caring that he can’t even see it with a telescope, “Know what? What the fuck is there to know? Do any of us know anything about Augustin? It’s been two months of playing with him, and I couldn’t tell you fucking anything.”

He almost throws a skate, but Jeff swoops in and takes it from him before he can. “Kent, if anyone was going to know anything, it was you.”

“Fuck,” Kent buries his head in his hands, grinding his palms into his eyes until he sees stars blossom against his eyelids. “I thought there was just bad blood. I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. I didn’t know…anything.”

Swoops is silent for a moment, before he says, “You were right to put Cross and Harley out. They were headhunting him when he was on the ice.”

He didn’t even notice that through the absolute travesty of the first period and the sound of Augustin breaking sticks across metal and plastic, a snap like bones breaking. Swoops sits down beside him, their shoulders barely brushing, and claps a warm hand on his back. Kent focuses on the point of contact, because if he doesn’t, the earth is gonna swallow him whole.

“You did what you could, Parse,” Swoops says gently, “You’re not our therapist, or our mom. You’re our captain, and you did what you needed to do for the team. Augustin…has shit he needs to figure out.”

“You’re pissed at him,” Kent grunts, “Fuck, I’m pissed at him. He fucked us tonight.”

“And he’s pissed at everyone,” Swoops snorts, patting his shoulder gently, “Maybe take a detour on your way back to yours. Or you can crash at mine if you want. Debra probably put a bomb under my fridge, though.”

“Nah,” Kent says, stripping off the bottom half of his equipment methodically, and hanging it neatly. His fingers are buzzing with adrenaline. His whole body is fuzzy with it. “I got an errand to run.”

“Text me when you get home,” Swoops says, pointing a threatening finger at Kent, “I’m not kidding. I want to make sure you’re alive tonight.”

“Yeah,” Kent says over his shoulder as he strides out the door.

The away team always gets put up in the same hotel off the Strip, but it’s still a lucky guess that Kent walks inside and sees the older Aeros celebrating at the hotel bar while their younger counterparts tear up the Strip. Kirby is there, his trimmed beard and bandaged, splinted nose catching Kent’s eye as he approaches, waving off the hostess in his path.

“Parse,” one of the Aeros alternates, Jared Whisner, spots him first, standing warily from his seat. “What’re you doing here?”

“Hey Jarhead, I need to talk to Kirby.” Kent says as easily as he can, pouring all his playboy Vegas charm into his face and voice in an effort to convince them that he means no harm, “Mind if I steal him for a bit?”

Kirby’s got his eyes narrowed at Kent. His nose is bruised and bandaged, and one of his eyes is going to be black tomorrow. He’s nursing a beer bottle that slips over the wooden bar top, and makes a conciliatory gesture with it when his teammates look over at him, “Man, he’s like five foot fuck-all, and he’s scared of my wife.”

“Everyone’s scared of your wife, Kirbs, she married you,” Kent replies, which some of the Aeros laugh at. Kirby gives them a weighted look.

“I’ll be fine, guys.”

Kent remains standing as the Aeros file away to a nearby table just out of earshot, jostling each other for space. Over Kirby’s head, there’s highlights playing: a spray of blood, the arc of a fist. His fingers are braced against the bar’s edge. It looks even worse on the screen than it did in person. From the camera’s vantage, no one can see Augustin’s eyes; only his fist hitting over and over and over. They’re making him look psychotic.

“Courtesy call?” Kirby asks hollowly, like he knows what’s about to happen. “Take a seat, Parse.”

He doesn’t sit. The last time he asked this question, he let Augustin skate by without answering. That was his mistake. He’s not making it again. This time, when he asks the question, he’s getting the full fucking answer even if it means ripping it out of Jason Kirby himself.

"What the hell happened with Augustin on the Aeros?"

Kirby shakes his head. “Man, I don’t want to get into the past-”

“The past?” Kent has to keep himself from reaching out and finishing the job Augustin started. His voice is cold and steely, sliding under skin like a knife, “Alright, Kirby. Let’s talk about this as captains. I just saw one of the best players on my team, who gets chirped and hit by every enforcer in the league without a care in the fucking world, snap the second you looked in his direction. If that was one of your guys, you would want some fucking answers too.”

Kirby stares at him for a second, and Kent thinks he’s about to be jumped by half the Aeros when their captain nudges his knee against the opposite barstool and derisively says, “Shit, Parson, no one ever tell you to keep your fucking voice down indoors?”

Kent sits, fingers tapping the bar top restlessly, “I’m not gonna rat you out or whatever you think is going on. I just need to know, because he-” he considers his next words very carefully, “We can’t play another game like that.”

“Parse-” Kirby sighs, and then winces at whatever pain it causes his nose. “It’s not as big a deal as you think it is.”

“Yes it is,” Kent says evenly, “You wanna know how I know that, Kirbs? Because you look like you’ve seen a fucking ghost.”

Kirby shakes his head, and takes a small sip from his beer. A bartender wanders by, and Kent waves him away before he can open his mouth. Kirby watches the man leave, brow flattening, and sighs again, long and loud. His voice is almost a whisper when he starts talking.

“Berenger and I were in training camp together in 2010,” he says quietly. “When we both made the roster, we started rooming together on roadies and shit. I lived with Cooper, one of the older guys, and Augustin lived alone in some fancy apartment. It all started out pretty sweet,” Kirby laughs hollowly, a sound that cuts right through Kent, because Kirby is nearing thirty and as tall as he is wide, and yet he’s laughing like a hopeless kid, “But it’s like Juniors, ya know? There’s a pecking order. You did what you were told, or there would be issues.”

“Sure,” Kent says suspiciously, because Rimouski had captains and rookies, but there’s a difference between age and experience, and a military style stratification. “What did they tell you to do?”

Kirby’s lips disappear as he purses them, his beard hiding the dour turn of his mouth but not the haunted loathing in his eyes. "The younger guys, the ones about as old as we are now, you wanted to be them. They were the ones who were on the billboards, and who management preferred because they were the first future of the team, like, the first generation. After games, they would take the underage kids to get drunk, and since me and Berenger were rookies, we always had to go.”

Young, rich athletes and idiots getting sloshed on a Wednesday night are pretty synonymous, but not for Augustin, who won’t touch a drop of alcohol no matter what. Kent has to process that for a few seconds before he asks weakly, “Augustin drank?”

“Not like he had much choice. If they thought we weren’t drinking enough, they would, like, spike our drinks and shit. Make us do and talk about weird stuff.” Kirby laughs dryly, “Nothing nearly as bad as anything in Juniors, but I guess Berenger snapped one night. He was so drunk, and he was just ripping into the guys, like he was some fucking...mother superior, telling them how they were ruining the sport and this was why we had such a reputation and all that other shit."

Kent can feel nausea clawing up the back of his throat. He’s heard stories about hazing and shit going past stupid traditions and silly fines. Everyone has stories, or friends who have stories. It wasn’t so much a thing at Rimouski as it was in other teams in the Q and certainly in the O, where Kirby played in Juniors. But there’s leagues of difference between knowing that the monster exists, and looking its ugly face dead in the eyes.

When he was fifteen, there was a conversation between Bad Bob and Alicia that he wasn’t supposed to hear, whispered late at night in the kitchen, about making sure he and Jack never ended up on the Saguneens or the Voltigeurs. Not the details, because Alicia wouldn’t even say them out loud, but the trade rumours about Kent disappeared in the following weeks.

Dear Jack, do you ever think we got lucky? I’m starting to think that we did.

"And?" he asks quietly, not sure if he really wants to know more. Kirby’s eyes are dark and distant, as if he’s seeing those ghosts again.

"Do you remember Goldie? Tim Goldman? He got traded to the Isles a few years later, but he was one of the core back then, alternate captain. At the time, he fucking…shit, man, he hit Berenger. Almost broke his jaw. I still remember the fucking sound of it. Took three guys to haul him off.”

Kent blinks. In December of 2010, Augustin was out for two weeks with an upper-body injury, no other details than that. Teams hide the reality of injuries from the public all the time, but usually, it’s to protect their players from other teams. Usually.

Kirby’s voice is robotic, as if he’s a VHS recording spitting out the story rather than someone who was there to witness it, someone who just watched and let it happen.

“Berenger went to management, and Goldie got all the players to leave him in the cold, make him seem like the…boy crying wolf. We all said it was a bar fight that Berenger started, even though Berenger never started fights. Or at least he didn’t.”

We . Kent feels the joints in his fingers click from clenching the edge of the bar so tightly. Kirby goes on, seemingly unable to stop.

“Management didn't do anything, so Berenger asked for a trade. Said he would refuse to play if they didn't send him somewhere else. They sent him down to the minors to get him out of their hair, but we kept fucking losing so they called him back up, and he kept asking for a trade until they sent him to New York right in time for the lockout." He sits back in his seat and taps the bottle neatly against the bar. “That’s it. That’s the story. You happy, Parse? You get what you want?”

Kent can’t see through the red in his eyes. He’s tearing a napkin methodically into shreds as he counts how many pieces they become: two, three, four, five, six, seven. He counts because if he doesn’t get to ten, he’s going to break that beer bottle over Jason Kirby’s head.

He takes a deep breath, “And you just fucking…left him there?”

Kirby doesn’t answer at first. He takes a long pull of beer, and then sighs. “There was nothing I could have done.”

It rings so fucking hollow. “Bullshit. You could’ve backed him up with management, you could’ve talked to your coach-”

"Fucking Coach Gerhard? Coach was part of it," Kirby spit, toying with the neck of his beer bottle. His voice is derisive, "He thought Berenger was too soft. After the first few games that season, he made Berenger rank us all by how much he thought we offered the team, and make notes on where we all needed to improve. Berenger said that he was told that everyone was doing it, and no one would know who said what. Coach shared it with Valley, you know, he was captain at the time, and Valley shared it with the core.”

“Fuck,” Kent breathes, because everyone knows Gerhard is an asshole who can’t get hired here or in Europe anymore, but no one ever talked about why. God, he could fill a fucking encyclopedia with the things nobody talks about.

Kirby’s voice is tight, “I’m sure you’ve seen by now that Berenger is nothing if not deeply thorough with his criticism. By the time the list got out, let's just say it didn't take much for Goldie to convince everyone else that Berenger had to go."

Kent feels his stomach slosh emptily, “Jesus fuck, Jason. I thought you were a good fucking dude. How the fuck couldn’t you say something?”

"I was a rookie too," Kirby snarls, turning to look at him with fire blazing in his lopsided brown eyes, "It was my first year with the Aeros, I wasn't about to fucking blow it."

"You're four years older than him-"

Kent has this thing, where he speaks before he can think. Kirby glares at him over his bottle.

"Not all of us are Kent Parson or Augustin Berenger. Some of us have to claw our way to where we are, and we get shit all the way through, and we can't afford to be fucking pussies about it."

"Kirbs, come on-"

"Nah," Kirby spits, slamming his bottle back down. The sound makes the whole bar look up, "Don't fucking get high and mighty with me, Parse. I'm the captain of the Aeros now, Goldie’s about to retire an Islanders hero, and Berenger's been bouncing around the league underpaid and putting up shit, below-caliber points for his entire career. Look me in the eyes and tell me that I fucking picked wrong."

“Hey, Parson,” Jared butts in, his mouth pursed, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I think you should go.”

“Yeah,” Kent hears himself say coldly. “I think that’s for the best.”

He gets up and throws a twenty onto the bar even though he didn’t order anything, and turns to go when something hooks him back around. Maybe Kirby’s right, and being Kent Parson means something. If it does, he’s not going to be like the guy sitting in front of him. He’s going to be like Bad Bob, who made damn sure neither of his kids ended up like this.

"Your rookies," he says, because he has to fucking check, "Rathers and Mitsuya. They don't have to do that shit, do they?"

Kirbs toys with his drink, mouth set in a flat line. "Fuck no. That shit ended when Goldie and Valley were traded and Gerhard was fired. We aren’t fucking with kids up here. This isn’t the O.”

Kent nods, and leaves without another word.

There are things that people don’t talk about in every sport: concussions, injuries, anything they think will make them seem any less like men. They all have stuff that nobody mentions, sitting in piles in the center of the locker room and the corners of their houses, varying in intensity and depth. It’s a toxic byproduct of raising a bunch of arrogant, talented boys to believe that they are the greatest in the world, and also never great enough.

Kirby’s story clicks into the empty space of the puzzle that is Augustin Berenger with a sickening sound. Cold, calculating, distant, Kent should’ve been able to guess.

Maybe this could’ve been overcome, back when it first happened. With the right team, and the right coach, getting to Augustin early before his prefrontal cortex finished developing and managing to convince him that he was worth having around before his brain froze over while convinced that he wasn’t. But five teams in seven years will convince any guy of the latter pretty quickly.

The blind faith of a rebuild involves hoping that every other team does exactly what you want them to do, without them even noticing it. What happens when they do the opposite? Complete and utter fucking collapse.

The worst part is that he has to tell himself, it could have been so much worse.

He can barely think as he drives home, fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Mike’s not working the door tonight, but the other doorman, a guy around his age named Carlos, stands when he walks into the lobby, straightening his blazer as he does.

“Saw the game,” he says nervously, fiddling with something that he finally sets down on the concierge desk. “Um…someone came in with him and left this for you.”

It’s a folded piece of paper, and he opens it to find Frank’s handwriting: B pretty out of it. Make sure he takes 2 ibuprofen every six hours.

“Thanks,” Kent hears himself say as he gets into the elevator, folding up the paper and tucking it into his coat pocket.

It’s five steps from the elevator to his apartment, but he still hesitates outside the door. What does “out of it” even mean? It’s dead silent inside the apartment when he presses his ear to the door and no light leaks into the hallway from underneath. His hand lands on the doorknob and finds it unlocked. The click is deafening.

There’s no use just standing there. He braces himself for the worst and opens the door.

The lights are off, except for the vintage lamp in the corner that Beth found when she helped him move in, its peach lampshade casting a warm glow and its strands of golden beads printing dots of light across the ceiling and the figure sitting cross-legged in an Aces hoodie and ratty grey joggers in the middle of Kent’s couch.

“Augustin?”

Augustin looks up at him, hood drawn over his messy dark hair and Kit burrowed in the crevice of his lap. His face is fucked: his cheekbone has a nasty red scratch, there’s a lump welling red on his jaw, and his bottom lip is split. In the light, the bags under his eyes are massive and dark. His fingers play through Kit’s fur idly as they stare at each other from across the room, his fingers and knuckles mummified in white bandages, and Kent doesn’t know where the fuck to begin.

“Hey,” Augustin finally says dully, “I heard we lost.”

“Jesus,” Kent says cleverly, “You look like shit.”

Augustin is silent for a minute, and Kent feels his gut turn over twice before there’s a gentle snort of laughter. “Fuck you, Parson.”

He drops his things and crosses the foyer, Augustin shifting slightly to accommodate him as he sits. Kit stirs at the disturbance, purring gently. Augustin looks down at her impassively, finger tracing the white diamond on her forehead. With his hood up and head tilted down, sitting cross-legged, he looks like a monk who’s taken a vow of silence.

Kent’s exhausted just looking at him. He can barely imagine what Augustin must feel. The silence is a third person sitting in the inch of air between Kent’s knee and Augustin’s thigh. Where does he even start? How does he open such a momentous door without having everything inside slide on top of him and bury them both like an avalanche?

Augustin looks back up at him once Kit lays her head back down, “They’re going to suspend me.”

“You don’t know that,” Kent says, even though it’s a sure thing, not a doubt in his mind about it. At best, they’re looking at three games and a hefty fine. He’s sure that Augustin’s already called his agent, because Augustin is nothing if not practical against all odds.

“Intent to injure,” Augustin grumbles, lifting Kit up to tuck her higher against his chest as he lays back against the couch cushions. He takes his phone out of his pocket and starts scrolling aimlessly. “I did intend to injure, by the way.”

“Maybe don’t say that at the hearing,” Kent says, leaning back so their heads are on the same latitude, “Maybe don’t say anything.”

Augustin snorts derisively at that. Kent can see that he’s looking at his social media, which is flooded with angry Aeros fans, and almost plucks the phone right out of his hand when a text from Angelique Berenger pops up.

je pense que tu aurais dû lui crisser une volée plus fort.

“I think you should have given him a harder beating,” Augustin translates wryly, throwing his phone aside. It lands with a thud amid the cushions, where it keeps buzzing up a storm, “My sister, role model to little girls across North America.”

Kent resists the urge to echo Angelique’s sentiment. “Listen, I’m gonna say something you’re not going to like.”

“Man,” Augustin says tiredly, head hitting the back of the couch so he stares up at the ceiling. “I don’t like most of the stuff you say.”

I know about what happened with the Aeros and it wasn’t your fault

I know that you’re ready to be traded at a moment’s notice and I wish you knew that we want you here.

I know you, and I’m not scared of you, and I’m not leaving.

He knows he can’t say any of that if he wants Augustin to hear it, because if someone said something like that to him, he would laugh. If someone told him six years ago that I know you’re scared, but it’s all going to be okay, he would have started swinging.

“I think you should see a sports psychologist,” he says quietly. “Even if they don’t make you do it as part of your suspension.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Augustin says to the ceiling, somewhat predictably. Kit leaps out of his lap and onto the floor. “Where do you get off-”

“Oy, fuckhead,” Kent says quietly, unwilling to rise to the bait, “I’m not here to tell you things that you already know. You already know how you played, how the fight went, and why you did it. I’m here to tell you that as your captain, you need to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me.”

It took him a long fucking time to learn that, and it was an excruciating long time. His job as captain isn’t to fix Augustin: he tried that once, to fix someone else himself, and he ended up hurting them both in the process almost beyond repair. He’s learned his lesson. He’s not going to fall into the colloquial definition of insanity.

Augustin twists his head to look at Kent, and a strange, small smile plays across his mouth. Kent thinks he might fall into the clinical definition, though.

“What?” he asks, because Augustin definitely shouldn’t be smiling after he said something like that. He braces himself for something: a jab, verbal or otherwise.

“We’re matching.” Augustin mutters, reaching out to prod the scabbed-over scar on Kent’s left cheek, fingers ghosting over the rough skin surrounding it. His pupils are massive. Kent feels his gut hollow out, and he scrambles back a bit, almost against his will.

“Oh my God, are you high?”

“What?” Augustin lifts his head, the look disappearing as if Kent imagined it, “No. I mean, they gave me some stuff for the pain, but it was just a shot of uh…lidocaine or cortisone or something, in my hand. I’m just tired. Are you fucking okay?”

Kent swallows, and tastes metal in the back of his throat. He’s been seeing a lot of ghosts today. “Yeah, yeah, sorry. Just…think about it, okay? The sports shrink.”

“Aye aye,” Augustin salutes sarcastically, hauling himself upright to sitting. “Listen, I’m sorry about how I played, and the stupid fucking match penalty. I was shit.”

“You weren’t…” Augustin raises an eyebrow, and Kent can’t help but sigh, “Yeah, fuck dude, you were bad.”

“Won’t happen again,” Augustin stands with a groan, “Ugh, I don’t know what I’m going to do during this fucking suspension.”

“Destroy your eyesight some more,” Kent offers, “Go buy a third outfit.”

“Yeah, laugh it up. At least now you can make up for your points deficit.”

Kent laughs, but it feels forced in his ears. Forget the silence: there’s a third thing in the room, a great sludgy heap sitting on top of the coffee table and leaking all over the floor, and Augustin will continue to pretend that it’s not there, and now Kent has to do the same. He follows Augustin with his eyes as he makes his way to his room, retreating into the darkness like he went quietly into the tunnel during the game.

“Listen,” Kent says before he can disappear completely, words tripping over themselves. “You know you can talk to me too, right? Even though I said you don’t have to. You can. If you want.”

Augustin doesn’t look at him, just stares at a spot of carpet like he’s seeing something that’s not there. Kent figures everyone’s been seeing a lot of ghosts today.

“I know,” he finally says, less like a fact and more like a consolation, “Night, Parson.”

The door shuts behind him with a deafening click and stays that way.

Notes:

i like to be funny in the notes but hazing is a really serious thing at all levels of hockey. most of what happened to augustin happened in real life: either to people i know, or friends of friends, or in the news. specifically, the thing about ranking teammates is a thing that the ex-coach for the maple leafs, mike babcock, famously did to mitch marner in his rookie year. it's also way worse than i described a lot of the time.

all this to say, hockey is a beautiful sport and i know some of the best people in my life from playing it. at the same time, especially in elite teams like Major Juniors, it's a microcosm of privilege and cruelty.

also i stressed over this chapter for so long that i just decided fuck it. hit post. it might be completely different next week! who knows? not me!

Chapter 11

Summary:

in which family matters, calls are made, and the Jeffrey Troy New Year's Party always includes some form of tomfoolery

Luckily, the decision on whether or not to send Augustin to a sports therapist is made for them by the National Hockey League Safety Department, who—despite a long storied past of giving arbitrary and stupid consequences—make the relatively fair decision of a five-thousand-dollar fine, a three-game suspension, and reinstatement contingent on at least ten sessions with a licensed sports psychologist before the end of the season.

Augustin is not as thrilled about this decision as Kent is. He walks out of the hearing room into a crowd of about eight or nine Aces waiting to see what he says, and his lips curl into a grimace, “I have to see a shrink.”

One would think he announced that they were putting him to death via firing squad based on how some of the team reacts, but Swoops just shrugs.

“I like my shrink,” he says. Augustin rolls his eyes, but Kent shoots him a grateful smile behind Augustin’s back.

“How’d it go?” he asks after the first appointment, two days after the hearing. They have a game against Ottawa tonight, and usually he’d be studying, but it’s fucking Ottawa, so he doesn’t bother.

Augustin kicks off his shoes, face indistinguishable from a thundercloud, “Ever seen the first half-hour or so of Good Will Hunting?”

Kent watches the first half-hour or so of Good Will Hunting that night after the game and yeah, that seems about right.

They don’t talk about it: Kent doesn’t ask, and Augustin doesn’t offer anything freely, so they’re both standing on the edge of a cliff waiting for a strong wind to push one of them off first so the other one has an excuse to jump. Things are going swimmingly.

They only win one game of the three that Augustin is out of the lineup, beating Ottawa at home and losing to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on the road. Each game, Kent feels as if he’s lost a limb. They swap in Petal, Makela, and the AHL call-up, but none of them click as well, and eventually they mix the lines together too much and Kent spends so much time adjusting to new wingers that he can’t spend it scoring as much as he’d like.

Augustin doesn’t come with them to Pennsylvania. Kent’s hotel room is jarringly empty and quiet.

Still, by the end of December, he’s up by four points. The tally when they leave for the holiday is fifty-seven to fifty-three. A few more games, thirteen more points, and Kent will win the bet, but the real marvel is that Augustin’s five points away from beating his personal record, just by December and with a three-game suspension to boot.

Every time that Kent thinks about why it’s such a big deal for such a great player, he wants to light something on fire. They ask Augustin about it in the locker rooms between periods and after games, different variations of the same question: what makes the Aces so different?

Augustin never answers those questions directly. After every interview, he ambles into the medical room for bandages, ripped hangnails leaking blood over his nail beds.

They both go home for Christmas. Augustin leaves late after their game on the 23rd for a red-eye to Montreal, and the ten hours Kent has to himself in the apartment alone are excruciating. It’s a welcome reprieve to go home to the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, to the two-story brownstone in Greenwich that his mom had wanted for as long as they lived in the clapboard apartment with mice and a broken radiator. The noise is deafening at night. It keeps him from thinking too hard.

But despite the snow, warmth, and company, there’s something itching under his skin, like a tag that won’t come off. He’s been carrying this heavy fucking ball on a chain around with him, waiting for the right time to bring it up, and the time still hasn’t come.

He’s washing dishes in the sink while Beth dries when the itch becomes too much to ignore.

“Hey, did you ever…”

How does he phrase a question like this to his sister, who’s six years younger than him and should live her life unburdened by his fucking multitude of problems? How does he phrase this question at all?

“Are you going to finish or did your brain shut down again?” Beth asks when he stops speaking, “Here, let me reboot it.”

She spins the wet dishcloth into a rat-tail and snaps him in the thigh with it. He flicks suds into her hair in retribution.

“What is it?” She asks as she combs the soap out of the dark hair she shares with their mother.

“I…” he gnaws on the inside of his cheek. “You know Jack, right?”

She gives him a look that clearly says are you fucking serious? “No, who’s Jack?”

He laughs, but the sound shakes around his chest like a single coin in a piggy bank, “Did you ever…notice that something was going on with him at the time? I know you were a kid. I’m just wondering, I guess.”

Beth stares at the plate she’s drying, the good hand-painted heirloom china that their mom only takes out for special meals like birthdays and holidays. It has their dad’s handwriting in gold paint on the bottom, PARSON in small block letters. His writing looks like Beth’s, even though they never got to properly meet. Her thumb rubs over the signature as she puts the plate in the dishrack.

“I don’t know,” she finally says, “He was like…a superhero to me, back when you guys were still close. He was like the big brother I never had.”

“Uh, okay, wow. Kiss your Christmas gift goodbye.”

“I’m only mostly kidding, you fucking Grinch. I mean that he used to treat me like I was his little sister too. But I remember I did notice that he was sad a lot. He used to smile at you, and then stop when you turned around, and-”

She cuts herself off abruptly. He turns off the sink and dries his hand on the dishcloth he has slung over his shoulder, leaning his hip against the edge of the counter. “It’s been a long time, Beth. I can take it.”

“With the benefit of hindsight,” she says quietly, as if she’s scared Jack’s in the other room to overhear her. “I think he smiled when you were looking, not because he was happy to see you, but because he wanted you to think he was happy.”

He nods. It’s probably true. They all knew something was wrong long before they ever admitted it to anyone, and Beth was part of that process whether she knows it or not. Kent stopped bringing Jack home to see her, and his mom stopped sending her up to see them both, as if they both anticipated the fallout months beforehand and made efforts to keep it from reaching more people than it needed to.

“He was really good at pretending, but in the end, I think he was so focused on it that he didn’t notice anything else. Why?” Beth asks, too knowing for an eighteen-year-old that Kent still remembers as being ten more often than not. He forces a smile onto his face and reaches out to pinch her cheek.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says as she swats his hand away. “Tell me more about that guy in your Medieval Poetry class that you’re pretending to just be friends with.”

“Ew, no, you’re going to send someone to beat him up.”

While he’s home, he makes a phone call: not to Bad Bob, or to Jack, though he calls them both to wish them a happy Christmas before his cell phone is seized by his mom so she and Alicia can have one of their hours-long talks. He sits in his mom’s office, which still smells of sawdust and paint from the renovations last year, and uses the landline to call as if that somehow makes it easier.

“Heyo,” Dustin Snow says when he picks up the phone on the fourth ring, “If you’re selling me something, it’s Christmas, so I will kindly tell you to go fuck yourself instead of doing it meanly-”

“Snow, it’s Kent Parson.”

Snowy is silent for a moment, and then he says, “Did you change your number?”

“I’m calling from my mom’s place,” he says, the blocky plastic phone pressed to his ear, “Hey, listen, do you have a minute?”

“Several,” there’s the sound of pattering steps, and then a door closing, “What’s going on? Is this about Jack?”

“No,” Kent chews on his words carefully, picking them out and lining them up like Scrabble tiles in order to ensure the best possible outcome, “This is about Augustin and the Aeros.”

There’s a deep, crackling sigh, “Fuck, man, on Christmas?”

The surging taste of bile has become familiar, if not wildly unpleasant. “You knew.”

“Of course I fucking knew, man,” Snowy says, his voice bitter and twisted, “I’m surprised he fucking told you.”

Kent snorts. “He didn’t. Kirby did.”

“Fuck,” Snowy says again, emphatically. “Man, every time we play each other I tell him that he should tell someone else about it, but he bites my fucking head off every time I try.”

“Sorry to get your hopes up,” Kent replies dryly, leaning back in his chair, “I thought you didn’t play with him. I mean, that’s what Jack led me to believe.”

“So that’s why he asked. Naw, man,” Snow grunts, “I mean, only for a couple games in the preseason, and then a couple in January when Cerveny was injured. I saw enough though, to know that getting picked up by Providence was a fucking godsend. Fuck dude, I’m surprised Jason told you about it.”

“I know,” Kent says darkly, “I almost fucking rocked him-”

“Shit,” Snow interrupts, “Parse, c’mon. Look, I get it. Gus got it the worst, no fucking doubt about it. He was their guy, their fucking you. When they found out they couldn’t make him do what they wanted, they fucking tossed him, but he was Augustin fucking Berenger. Could you imagine what they would’ve done to Kirbs, some no-name AHL call-up, if he said anything?”

Kent doesn’t know what to say to that, because he can hazard a guess. He swallows jaggedly, “You know Augustin better than me, Snow. What the fuck do I do?”

“Parse,” Snow says, his voice as soft as it probably has the capacity to be, “Just because I know this, doesn’t mean I know him. Frankly, I don’t think anyone knows him better than you. We’ve all seen the fucking commercials. You guys have something good going on. You can’t let this ruin it. Unless you’re playing us, in which case ruin it all you want.”

“Right,” Kent replies hollowly. “Right, yeah. Sorry for calling on a holiday.”

“S’fine,” Snow says casually, “My sisters are driving me fucking nutty, and their husbands are, like, so fucking stupid it makes me angry. I’m thinking about orchestrating a divorce somehow,” his dry voice warms slightly, “But hey, listen, keep me posted on how Gus is doing. I saw the fight and figured that was what it was about.”

“Yeah, I will. See you at All-Stars.”

“Ugh,” Snowy replies, and then he hangs up. Once Kent manages to rescue his phone from his mother, he stares nervously at Augustin’s number for twenty minutes before he throws it down on the couch and leaves Augustin alone to be with his family. It’s the least he can do.

The rest of Christmas goes well. Kent does all the touristy stuff he never gets time to do during the season: tear around the Rockefeller Square ice rink with his screaming sister in tow, do a story circle at the public library that’s well attended by a bunch of kids in Rangers jerseys and a few media personnel, and he gets to make sure his mom is doing okay. This is the first year where both of her kids are out of the house. He doesn’t want her to get lonely.

“I’ll be back next week,” he promises for the eighth time as he waits for a taxi to the airport. It’s snowing pretty hard, dusting his mom’s salt-and-pepper hair even whiter. “Buffalo, and both New York teams. Are you sure you can’t come? I can still get you a ticket.”

His mom has to get on her tiptoes to kiss his cheeks, even though he’s shorter than his entire team by a significant margin, “Thanks, sweetie, but I have work. The girls and I will be watching, though.” She adjusts the hat she makes him wear whenever he walks outside even though he’s going directly from the house to the airport. He’s long since stopped complaining about it. “And if you end up having some free time, bring your roommate over for tea.”

“Augustin?” Kent says, as if his mom might mean his cat. He’s successfully managed not to blab too much over Christmas dinner, but his mom’s always been the sharpest tool in the shed. She knows when he’s avoiding talking about something as well as when he can’t shut up about it.

“A mother wants to know the people her son is friends with,” she says, a glint in her eye. Kent blames his pink cheeks on the sudden gust of cold wind.

“Sure, Mom, if I can convince him.”

He gets in late on the 29th, and crashes into bed without thinking about how empty the apartment is. There’s a mandatory practice on the 30th, but Augustin doesn’t show: it turns out that the highway between Baie-Comeau and Montreal was snowed in, and he’s stuck there until his new flight on the 31st. Luckily, there’s not a game to miss until the 2nd, but nobody is pleased about this outcome. Least of all Augustin.

It turns out that he texts a lot like he talks: if I have to spend one more fucking minute in this goddamn town, I’m going to strap myself to an ICBM and shoot myself into the Nevada desert.

Kent texts back: but then u would blow us all up :(

A small price to pay

He offers to pick Augustin up on the 31st, but the flight keeps getting delayed until Augustin texts him a flurry of expletives and tells him not to bother and that he’ll get a cab. Kent’s dressed in his New Year’s Eve outfit by the time there’s a harried thump and the jingle of keys outside the door. His heart leaps, and he forces himself to stay sitting on the couch, aimlessly scrolling on his phone.

“Jesus fucking Christ, that took a thousand fucking years.”

Augustin’s carrying two bags this time, his carry-on and a small leather duffel that looks brand new. His black-rimmed glasses, which Kent learned are actual glasses only recently, are fogged up and silver. He nearly trips over Kit, who meows insistently and has no regard for her safety.

“Hello, Cat,” he says stoically, the familiarity of his voice and stubborn refusal to call her by her real name washing over Kent like warm water, “Eat my socks and see how stingy I can be with your treats.”

“How was Christmas?” Kent asks as Augustin takes his glasses off and squints around as he cleans them.

“Oh, it was great,” he mutters, replacing them on his face and kicking off his snow boots, “It was pissing snow and I shovelled the driveway eight thousand times because my dad’s too stubborn to let me buy them a snowblower. My mom kept trying to ask me when I’d give her grandkids, me and my dad got into a shouting match over my trade out of Montreal in front of my entire extended family and then we got into it again on the car-ride back to the airport, and Angelique got me a creepy fucking bobblehead of you as a stocking stuffer.” He inhales deeply, and then turns to Kent, “How was yours?”

Kent says, “It was fine. Can I see the bobblehead?”

“I snuck it back into her suitcase,” Augustin shakes his head wearily, carting his bags over his shoulder, “Okay, give me a fucking minute to change and then we can go.”

Tonight is the Fifth Annual Jeffrey Troy and His Fellow Aces New Year’s Eve Party. Swoops made a sign this year, out of old hockey sticks and a spray-painted bedsheet that he sent to Kent along with the formal invitation.

 

You are cordially invited to the Fifth Annual Jeffrey Troy and His Fellow Aces New Year’s Eve Party.
9pm at the Troy Residence.

Plus ones permitted.* Bring one (1) bottle of spirits or equivalent to enter.**

*If you’ve been dating or related for longer than three months (this means you, Kent)
**Equivalents include other forms of alcohol, Kent’s cat, or a string of Christmas lights (fuck you Debra)

 

Kent’s bone tired for no discernable reason, but the whole team and some of their AHL call-ups will be packed like sardines into the house. He has to go. It’s practically mandatory.

It looks like Augustin finally went shopping while he was away, because he emerges from his room without his glasses, clad in dark jeans and a burgundy cable-knit sweater that brings a healthy flush to his pale cheeks and makes his dark hair seem more brown than black. Kent swallows three times before he wolf-whistles.

“Did your mom buy you that?”

“My great-aunt Mathilde,” Augustin says very seriously, picking at the ribbing, “I don’t like…”

“Colour?” Kent offers as he grabs the keys and his dark peacoat. “It looks good on you.”

He curses himself internally, but Augustin doesn’t seem to notice the compliment, because he’s a fucking jerk. He just pulls the sleeves of his sweater up to expose slender forearms and mutters, “Global warming is going to kill us all.”

“We’re in a fucking desert,” Kent replies as they ride the elevator down and wave to Carlos on their way to the car. “It’s not gonna be as cold as Quebec. It doesn't mean the world is about to end.”

“I’m not wearing a jacket in December for the first time since I was nineteen,” Augustin says dryly as he ducks into the passenger seat, “Forgive me if I’m not as acclimated as you are to the slow heat death of the Earth.”

Every time Kent says or thinks the word Houston, he feels the sudden urge to start smashing glass, so instead he asks a much safer question. “What’s the problem with your dad? He’s still not happy that you were traded out of his hometown team?”

When he was drafted by the Aces, it took Beth three years to relinquish her ratty Rangers jersey in favour of his. He knows from experience that Montreal is thousand times more ferocious.

Augustin is silent for a minute, and then dully says, “He thinks I asked to be traded.”

Kent nearly hits the brakes on a green, and swears under his breath, “Who? Your dad?”

“He thinks I have commitment issues,” Augustin says wryly, staring out the window, “He heard somewhere that I asked to be traded out of Houston, and now every time it happens he thinks it’s because I can’t settle down in one place.”

Kent’s walking a very fine line when he casually asks, “Did you?”

“Did I do what?”

“Ask for a trade out of Houston.”

Augustin’s voice goes as frigid as a Quebec winter, “Man, if I wanted someone to jump up my ass about this, I can call him anytime I want.”

As quickly as it opened, the gap in Augustin’s armour closes, and they make meaningless conversation about the holidays for the next ten minutes. The entire time, Kent’s brain is on fire. If Augustin hasn’t even told his dad what the hell happened, how the fuck is he supposed to approach it? He’s trying to be patient, but his mom would be the first to say that he’s never been patient for a day in his life.

“Hey,” he says as he pulls into an empty parking spot about two blocks away from Swoops’ place, because Debra likes to get the Aces’ cars towed whenever she sees that Swoops has people over. “So, I feel like I should warn you that, uh…these parties can get a little crazy.”

Augustin gives him a weird look half-disguised by the shadows between the streetlights as they walk towards the sound of music in the distance and the glow that is Swoops’ hedges. He’s holding a looped strand of Christmas lights with weird little snowmen on them, and their lopsided, cheaply painted faces are creeping Kent out as they flicker in and out of darkness. “How crazy is crazy?”

“You know what?” Kent muses as they walk up the stairs, Allie’s Swedish house music thudding rhythmically through the ground and the bedsheet banner already hanging in tatters. “Usually I can’t remember the specifics.”

They walk into the foyer, and Augustin looks like he’s just walked straight into a wall.

There are about a thousand people in the living room: most notably, Frisk and Allie are shotgunning beers by the entryway, Petal and Linsky are having a loud argument about either Assassins Creed or Italian Renaissance geopolitics, and Smitty is frantically fanning a wicker basket of flowers that is currently on fire with a panicked expression while his girlfriend runs into the kitchen.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s just past nine o’clock and the party technically started four minutes ago.

“What the fuck?” Augustin asks, blinking a few times like he’s not sure whether he put his contact lenses in right.

“Crazy shit happens at the Jeffrey Troy New Year’s Party,” Kent sighs, and drops his offering of scotch on the nearest table that doesn’t currently have something on fire, “Troy! You got shit burning out here!”

Smitty’s girlfriend is a lot smarter than he is, because she brings in a massive metal pot and slams it on top of the on-fire wicker basket. “Nobody move that for a few minutes.”

“Did someone say fire?” Swoops asks, sticking his head out of the kitchen. He’s got those kitschy plastic New Year sunglasses and a top hat on, and his floral Hawaiian shirt can only be described as a visual carpet bombing. “Why’s my pasta pot out here?”

“Okay,” Kent sighs, pops the top off of the scotch bottle, and takes a massive sip. It burns down his throat, and he exhales harshly, feeling it pool hot and sharp in his gut. He doesn’t much like drinking anymore, but if there’s ever a night to get blasted, it’s this one.

He turns to Augustin, who looks like a deer trapped in headlights, “Are you cool to drive?”

“Huh?” Augustin looks at him, and nods, “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

Kent drops the keys in his hand, and makes a face, “Man, that sweater’s so fucked by the end of the night.”

“I don’t like it, anyways,” Augustin says, and tucks the keys away. “Don’t fucking hover, Parson. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

Kent leaves him, because it’s weird if he stays after that. He drinks about three fingers of scotch before putting the bottle down somewhere and joining Swoops and Scraps, along with some of the wives and girlfriends in the kitchen. “Dude, that fucking shirt is horrifying.”

“Bro,” Swoops swears, speech already flagging from whatever’s in his red Solo cup, “I didn’t think you were coming. I thought you were picking Gus up at the airport.”

Kent can’t help but grin as Swoops drapes his substantial frame over Kent’s shoulders and back like a puppet being let down from his strings. The whiskey is already starting to hum through his veins. “He’s here, I left him in the living room.”

“He’s here?” Swoops gasps in delight, his weight disappearing from Kent’s back so fast that Kent stumbles forward. He swans away, holding his top hat tightly to his head, “Auuuugustiiiiin…”

He disappears, and then there’s a thud, and a loud shout from the living room, “Merde, Troy! Not again!”

Cross’ wife, Lena, stifles a snort into her wrist, clutching her own red cup against her chest. She’s starting to look a little tipsy as well, though she carries it much better than everyone else. “You drinking tonight, Kent? I brought the bottled sangria that you like.”

“Already started,” he feels his grin go a little lopsided.

“Attaboy,” Scraps crows, tugging Kent under his arm and rubbing knuckles into his hair.

He manages to extricate himself and make his way around Swoops’ massive house while he nurses a cup of that shitty bottled sangria, the whiskey tilting his footsteps this way and that. Everyone is here: kids are at home with babysitters, and the house is so full that its walls are nearly bursting. He meets about eight new girlfriends within the span of an hour, and struggles to keep track of them all. It’s an unfortunate reality that they all look the same when he’s sober, let alone halfway drunk.

The thudding music cuts out with a sharp shriek at one point, and then someone puts on some early 2000s pop hits. Kent watches from the second floor as a bunch of the wives dance together on the patio, their husbands looking on fondly and shaking their heads when their wives try to beckon them into the fray.

An ache stabs at his heart, and he blames the alcohol for it.

By the time he’s made the rounds to everyone, it’s already half past eleven. Cross and Linsky are engaged in a very competitive round of Scrabble that has half the team leaning over while the New York ball drop (hah) replays in the background.

Augustin looks over at him when Kent slides up and nearly falls against his solid frame. An arm reaches out to steady him, and it’s so warm that he nearly loses the ability to breathe.

“What’s going on?” he manages to say. Augustin snorts, eyes trained on the Scrabble board.

“Well-”

“Shh,” Linsky slurs, holding up a clumsy hand, “Gus isn’t allowed to comment, because he’s…too good at this game.”

“Not particularly. Just sober,” Augustin says sardonically, and Kent laughs, leaning against Augustin for further support. His breath catches again when Augustin’s arm comes up and around to grip his shoulders casually, fingers laying against his arm as he pulls Kent against his side.

They all watch with bated breath as Cross clumsily collects a series of tiles into his palm and plays zloty with a triple word score. “Ta-daaaaa.”

The room explodes.

“That’s not a fucking word!” Linsky cries, “I’ve fucking had it with you, dude!”

“Polish currency,” Augustin says under his breath as everyone starts arguing about the merits, Cross defending himself louder than the rest of them. The noise pierces Kent’s head like a fucking nail gun, and he has to set down his cup, wandering out of the room and into the quiet cave of Swoops’ dark guest bedroom hallway. The warmth of Augustin’s arm disappears and leaves a cold imprint on his sleeve.

Augustin doesn’t seem to like it when people touch him, but Kent was basically making a fucking nest in his side, and he didn’t say a thing.

It doesn’t have to mean anything. It was probably just because Kent was pinning his arm to his torso. Swoops drunkenly tried to kiss Makela on the cheek and accidentally hit his mouth about fifteen minutes ago, and that’s nothing compared to whatever freaky symbiosis Frisk and Allie have going on. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

“Parson?”

He looks up to see Augustin standing framed by the light, and tries to smile weakly. “Hey, just…” he motions to his head, fingers splayed. He expects Augustin to turn and leave, but he retreats into the darkness with Kent, leaning his back against the opposite wall. The noise is quieter here, only marginally, but Augustin’s presence seems to dampen it enough to be bearable.

“They said that I should be the Scrabble referee,” he says dryly, “So now I’m hiding.”

“Smart. Cross has the rulebook memorized.”

“You know,” he muses, craning his neck to look out at the living room, “When you said these parties got crazy, I really thought you meant something else. Not Troy wearing a really fucking ugly shirt and Cross eight drinks deep and killing everyone at Scrabble.”

Kent feels his lips compress, and attempts to decompress them before Augustin looks back. Augustin looks almost wistful as he watches whatever’s going on in the other room. “At least it’s not chess. What did you expect?”

Augustin shrugs, his dark gaze pinning Kent where he stands, “Dunno. Shouting. Shots. More shit on fire than whatever Smitty did when we walked in.”

“No competitive Scrabble.”

“Guess I’m just not acclimated,” Augustin mutters, fiddling with the sleeve of his sweater. It’s survived mostly intact, miraculously, although there’s a snagged stitch on his shoulder. “So, we’re playing the Wild in a couple of days. Any idea how to get past Things One and Two?”

Kent fucking hates the Knaff brothers. He’s not sure why, but there’s just something about them. His mouth twists, “Hit them really hard.”

“Haha,” Augustin deadpans, checking his watch. “You can give it a try, but don’t whine to me when you bounce right off.”

“We can try setting up some one-timers,” Kent jokes. It’s gallows humour, not that Augustin would know. In Rimouski, “one-timer” was slang for a hookup. He would make that joke in Jack’s proximity whenever he wanted to piss him off. He was more ornery back then, more angry about being ignored. Nowadays, that’s the kind of joke that Jack might make, that would make his left eye twitch. Oh, how the tables have turned.

“Huh,” Augustin says, like he’s considering it, “That might get past their goalie. Sure, we can set up some one-timers.”

The earnest acceptance makes him snort. “Jack’s going to be pissed.”

He doesn’t realize that he’s said that out loud until Augustin asks, “What do you mean?”

Kent’s mouth is filled with cotton, pressing against the insides of his cheeks and down against his tongue. “Nothing.”

Augustin’s eyes narrow, “You know, you’ve been weird since the Providence game. Is it the thing Jack said to me? The, uh…shovel talk, or whatever?”

He says it so easily, like there’s nothing dragging that conversation down with its weight. It’s not his fault he doesn’t know, hell, Kent made it his life’s mission to convince the world to not even guess that there might have been more than team chemistry going on between him and Jack. So why is he so fucking angry about it all of a sudden?

“Yeah, because Jack’s fucking worming around trying to figure shit out and having weird clandestine conversations with my linemate like I’m not even there. If it was one of your teammates, you’d probably be a little fucking mad too!”

It’s about then that he realizes he’s almost yelling.

“You good, Parse?” Swoops asks drunkenly from the other room, and Kent wants to laugh, but he’s not sure he can do it without his voice breaking. He’s not actually mad at Jack: it’s just convenient to be. It means he doesn’t have to be angry at himself.

“We’re good,” Augustin calls back, a strange, unreadable look on his face. His voice dips lower, “What the fuck, Kent? What’s your fucking problem?”

“You’re my fucking problem,” Kent mutters, rubbing his eyes.

He regrets it the second that it comes out. Augustin’s eyes shutter, his open face closing with an almost audible snap. Kent swears under his breath. How does he keep fucking doing this?

“No, hey, that’s not what I fucking meant-” he grabs Augustin by the wrist, and Augustin tears his arm free with a grimace.

“Nah, it’s fine, it’s-”

“No, I’m sorry,” Kent has to dart in front of him to keep him from storming away, barring the hallway with his arms braced on either wall, “Augustin, seriously, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just…I’m worried about you, man.”

“Don’t be," Augustin says shortly, arms crossed in front of him. It’s not a conciliation, but a demand: don’t you fucking dare worry about me.

At that, he can’t help but scoff, pressing a palm to his forehead. “You know what? I’m tiptoeing around like one false move will set you off, Berenger, and it’s fine, I’ll do it, but you can’t be fucking mad at me if I somehow do that wrong. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.”

He must say that too loudly as well, because Augustin drags him by the sleeve into the nearest empty room, which happens to be Swoops’ guest bedroom, with its horrendous black-and-white chevron bedspread and heinously orange lamp. He shuts the door behind them, muffling the sounds of the party outside. Kent sits on the bed with a huff, burying his head in his hands.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Augustin asks, his voice dark.

“You know what?” Kent says wearily. His head feels like a bowling ball sewn onto his neck. “Just fucking forget I said anything.”

It’s a lot easier to blame someone who’s not there to defend themselves. It used to be Augustin and the Q and fluoxetine, back when Kent was still chasing the glory of his past like a dog after a pickup truck. Now, it’s Jack, who still knows Kent too well for how little Kent knows about him. It means that one of them has changed, and the other is still stuck in time, left behind as the world keeps moving forward.

“What does Zimmermann even have to do with anything?” Augustin asks, unwilling to unlatch from the conversation, “So what, is he jealous that we’re putting up great points, and that he’s been replaced? Big fucking whoop.”

He pronounces ‘whoop’ like a fucking Frenchman and it’s absurd. This whole thing’s absurd, but Kent’s been keeping so much locked inside his chest that something’s gotta give. Something’s gotta go. And if not something that will topple the great precarious ruin that is Augustin Berenger, then it has to be something else.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he swears, half out of his mind as he stands, “Jack didn’t say that shit because he thinks we’re great linemates, Augustin! He thought that you were my fucking boyfriend!”

It’s a consequence of the whiskey, is what he would say to anyone who asked if they walked in right now. It’s not true. He’s always been a lightweight with a fast metabolism; the alcohol hits him hard, fast, and leaves him just as quickly. He’s almost as sober now as he was when he walked in three hours ago.

Augustin is staring at him quietly, head tilted to the side. Slowly, he shakes his head, a dry, flat laugh peeling from his mouth, “That’s fucking funny, Parse. You and Jack have a fucked up sense of humour, I guess.”

“He wasn’t kidding.”

Kent’s spent most of his life lying to people. That’s how he knows that a lie of omission is still a lie, because most people tend to believe the best of those they love. But Augustin’s lived a different life from Kent, and yet one that’s entirely too similar. All he knows how to do is believe the worst of people.

Maybe it’s weak, but Kent cannot fucking handle Augustin Berenger thinking the worst of him.

And maybe he’s tired. And maybe he’s still drunk. And maybe he’s crazy. None of these things are mutually exclusive.

Augustin’s voice is quiet when he asks, “What?”

"Jack thought that we were dating," Kent inhales deeply, and just says it, because he’s already dug himself way too deep, and so the only way out is down, "Because I'm gay."

Augustin stares at him for so long that Kent can hear the clock on the bedside table ticking the seconds away. Five. Six. Seven.

At eight, Augustin walks stiffly into the bathroom, and shuts the door sharply behind him.

---

When Augustin Berenger was eighteen years old, he was drafted first overall by the Houston Aeros. If anyone asks, that’s where the story starts.

He was a tall, gangly kid, and when his mother wept into his shoulder, and he ascended the stage in Los Angeles, while sweat dripped in rivulets down his back and his pale skin flushed from the heat of the lights, he thought that he was invincible. Untouchable.

He returned to the Baie for one week before the Aeros expected him at training camp, and at the same time, Christophe Patenaude came home. That is where this particular story actually starts.

Chris had been Augustin’s forebear in almost every sense: three years older, same minor hockey team and a former linemate of his sister’s, an NHL-bound hometown hero and the best defenceman at Boston College. He was the one who taught Augustin that the best kind of hockey is smart hockey.

It was pure coincidence that they ran into each other at the grocery store with their moms.

“Sorry about the Frozen Four,” Augustin had awkwardly said while their mothers jabbered on. Chris had just shaken his head with a small smile.

“Why apologize? You’re enough of a victory for this town.”

Chris had always privately been Augustin’s hero. It was a symptom of the invincibility that he asked him, “How long are you in town?”

They met for coffee the next day on the one street that formed the downtown of Baie-Comeau, and it was Chris who said at the end, “Wanna come over for a bonfire tomorrow night? We’ll celebrate the future of hockey.”

A bonfire with Chris’ friends became beers in the backyard, which became joints in the woods, which led to them drunk and high the night before Augustin was meant to leave, stargazing in the back of Chris’ pickup truck.

“Dude, this is so fucking sick,” Chris had laughed, and then they were leaning their heads against each other’s necks, and then he could feel Chris’ lips dance across his collarbone, and then they were flat in the bed of the Patenaudes’ pickup truck unbuckling belts and unzipping flies.

The next morning, Chris didn’t mention it, so Augustin didn’t either. They just smiled and parted ways, and when Chris’ promising hockey career ended with ten steel pins in his knee six months later, Augustin knew it was best to stay far, far away. But his life had been irrevocably changed in a single messy, dark July night. He returned to Houston with newfound knowledge about why he never really cared about girls, or nights out, or anything other than the sport he cradled in his two hands.

Maybe in a kinder world, Jack Zimmermann wouldn’t have been the first NHL player to come out. But in this world, the real one, the Aeros threw proverbial paint thinner all over Augustin and stripped his invincibility from him like old wood varnish.

He survived his rookie season by the skin of his teeth, and his newfound discovery became yet another potential weakness for Goldman and Gerhard, and all the others to poke and prod at. He shoved it down as far as it could go, and didn’t take it out for more than a night at a time. There was no time for self-discovery or a journey of becoming: he had to make sure that no one got access to more ammunition than they already possessed. It wasn’t a particular shame that he carried. It was just one of many potential bruises, this one simply larger than most.

And then Jack Zimmermann came out as the face of gay hockey, and Augustin perilously thought, what if?

But there was never going to be a short blond baker waiting for him at the end of the game to kiss his cheeks and accompany him home. Augustin doesn’t do sweet and sappy, he doesn’t know how. He’s a workaholic in the worst sense, and there’s not a person alive who would understand that other than someone who does exactly what he does. What’s the point of coming out? He will never have the thing that people come out for, anyway.

He tried to have a boyfriend once, in Zurich when he played there during the lockout. Despite their best efforts, it was all too much for everyone involved, and even now, the thought of the handsome, sweet loose end walking around Switzerland terrifies him in his sleep.

But what if?

He’s been swallowing any desire he’s had for any teammate in the last seven years, because desire blinds him to their faults. He knows he can’t see the fist coming through the rose-coloured glasses, and that when it inevitably hits, the glass will break into his eye.

He grips the edge of the sink, staring at himself in the amber streetlights coming in from the bathroom’s translucent window. He looks young. And scared. Maybe he still is.

But what if?

There’s never going to be anyone waiting for him to come home, he’s known that for his whole life. Maybe there’s something to be said about someone who’s already there. Mutually assured destruction at worst. Collective understanding at best.

Fuck it. He’s been young and scared for the last seven years of his life. It has to end somewhere. He has to start somewhere.

And whether or not he would admit it out loud, there's no kinder place to start than with Kent fucking Parson. God, if his past self could see him now, he'd be screaming.

For some reason, the thought makes him laugh.

He opens the bathroom door to see Kent still standing there like a lost sheep. “You’re gay.”

Kent glares at him, arms crossed defensively over his chest. He looks as young and fucking scared as Augustin feels, “You fucking ran away? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You’re gay?” He has to hear it one more time, in order to make it real.

“Jesus fuck, Augustin, I know you’re rural, but I thought Canada was supposed to be some sort of gay paradise-”

“Hey, cool it with the casual classism and weird nationalist stereotypes,” Augustin snaps, and then he realizes that in all of this, all of his hiding and realizations and fucking verbal vomit, he forgot to tell Kent Parson that he was also gay.

Ironically, he just can’t make the words come out. He crosses the room, grabs Parson by the collar, and yanks him up so he's on his tiptoes, because if he’s going to do this, he needs Kent to be just as vulnerable as he’s about to be.

“My neck is gonna hurt so bad after this,” he whispers. Kent's eyes are wider than moons, like he's bracing for a punch.

“After what?”

What a fucking stupid question. Augustin leans down and seals their mouths together.

When the lips against his are leaden, he draws back. In the bedroom’s mellow light, Kent's hair is gold, and the shadows cast across the cut of his jaw are ludicrous. Augustin is so fucking annoyed that Kent Parson is as attractive as everyone says he is, as beautiful as he is on the ice when he’s skating like he has wings on his feet.

“Is that all you've got? Seriously?” he asks Kent, who's staring at him with his mouth parted in shock. His chest heaves for air, “I've had better kisses in middle school.”

Kent Parson is not one to back down from a challenge.

He lights that fire under Kent’s ass, and suddenly he’s being shoved towards the bed, supporting the full weight of the five-foot-nine franchise player trying to eat his face. Kent kisses like he plays: eager and biting and furious, and it’s fucking fantastic. Augustin feels the back of his knees hit the edge of Troy’s guest bed and lets himself go over, dragging Kent on top of him.

This is real? I can really have this?

Kent’s perched on top of his hips, a fist tangled in the collar of his sweater, yanking Augustin halfway between sitting and standing. He sits up fully, forcing Kent to straddle his lap as his fingers burrow into Kent’s hips and yank the shirt out of his pants. He presses his mouth to the corner of Kent’s lips, under his jaw, against the cords of his neck. Beneath his lips, Kent’s throat bob as he exhales sharply, and fingers twine through his hair, tugging gently at the locks.

I can really have this.

“Kent,” he whispers against collarbone, resting his forehead against Kent’s shoulder. His breathing is laboured, and he can taste the cologne on Kent’s pulse points as he speaks, tracing a hand up the line of his spine through his thin shirt. Augustin hasn’t been drunk in years, but this is how he remembers it feels: warm, light, dizzy, and honest, “tu es si beau."

And the feeling of a living, breathing person on top of him disappears. In its place is cold air and stone.

“No,” Kent whispers, and Augustin feels the moment die violently, its blood leaking through his fingers. He stops, drawing his head back, the grip of his hands loosening on Kent’s hips and against the line of his back.

In the orange light, Kent looks as if he’s been through hell: hair mussed, clothes decimated, eyes red and wet, expression desolate. Augustin kissed Kent Parson, and Kent is looking at him as if he’s killed someone.

His stomach fucking drops.

“I can't do this again,” Kent whispers. His hands come up to grip the sides of Augustin’s face, the pads of his thumbs gentle against the corners of Augustin’s eyes. His mouth flutters vaguely, and Augustin thinks that maybe he’ll lean in again, but all he says is the same thing. “I can’t do this again.”

Again.

“It’s okay,” he hears himself say, not because it is okay. He says it because Kent is shaking despite the gentleness of his hands on Augustin’s face, and Augustin never thought that someone like Kent could feel fear before the prospect of retirement and no more hockey grew too wide to ignore, in some nebulous time fifteen years from now.

Kent shakes his head mutely, cowlicks swinging, and Augustin can’t help himself; he tucks one back behind his ear, pinning it in place with the pad of his finger. “Kent. It’s okay. I shouldn’t have assumed. It’s probably…just been a while for you, yeah? It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

It doesn’t have to mean anything. Kent’s tipsy, Augustin’s dead sober but that’s unavoidable, and three hours ago Smitty set a centrepiece on fire with a sparkler. Crazy shit allegedly happens at the Jeffrey Troy New Year’s Eve Party, and this can just be one of many incidents. It’s probably not even the first time someone’s kissed another guy at one of these.

“New year, new me, right?” he tries to joke, and hears its dead body hit the floor with a thud. There’s counting in the other room: it’s almost midnight.

Kent’s looking at him with something like pity, and for once, Augustin lets him, because it means he can look back. His throat bobs as he struggles to swallow down the welling lump in his chest. They can hear the countdown from the other room: “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”

On ‘one,’ it’s Kent who leans in.

Augustin shares his last kiss with Kent Parson at midnight. It’s slow and soft, almost an apology. Kent’s hands brace themselves feather-light against his jaw and the nape of his neck, fingers roving gently over his skin and through the curls at the back of his head.

He lets it end all too quickly and feels cold in the aftermath, colder still as Kent clambers off his lap and quietly tucks his shirt back into his pants, smoothing out the wrinkles with a palm. Once he’s deemed himself suitable, except for the untameable mess of his cowlicked hair, he opens the bedroom door. A shaft of light streams in along with the sound of cheering, and Augustin shies away from the brightness. Kent hesitates in the doorway, and he wants to scream. Just fucking get it over with!

But Kent is, no matter what he says or does or believes about himself, a good man.

“I’m sorry,” he says over his shoulder, “I just can’t do it again.”

Augustin can’t do anything but nod. “I know.”

Kent leaves the door open, and Augustin sitting on the edge of the bed, alone.

Notes:

is this even anything?

by the way i started the rat race (summer job) so the chapters will come less frequently

Chapter 12

Summary:

In which Augustin gets advice from his sister, Kent's mom, and a neurologist allegedly named Dr. Gino

The apartment becomes a museum, of sorts, and the main exhibit is Kent Parson. He’s twenty-four, five-foot-nine, blond, fit, and a robot made of wax that acts exactly like Kent did before everything went to shit.

Augustin can’t help but marvel at the sheer skill that Kent employs in pretending that nothing has changed. He silently drove the real Kent home from Troy’s house at one in the morning expecting the worst, and woke up with a copy that smiles, talks, and acts exactly the same as Kent from twenty-four hours ago.

He supposes he should be grateful, but all he is is fucking confused. He has never been confused in his entire life up until this point, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

So he does what he does best. He starts watching game clips.

I just can’t do it again.

At some point, probably in their second year of Juniors if their playmaking is any reasonable barometer, Kent Parson and Jack Zimmermann started hooking up. They couldn’t have been dating: Augustin watches the old Oceanic games he digs out of the archives and old YouTube clips, and sees that for every miraculous pass and eager smile, there is a clip of arguing and harsh grimaces.

“Trouble in paradise,” one of the announcers jokes while Kent and Zimmermann argue on the bench. Augustin cringes. He forgot how fucking weird everyone was about them back when they were kids. Neither of them can be more than sixteen in this game.

He thinks he can pinpoint an exact game, but it’s more logically sound to give a broader outlook: the latter half of Augustin’s last season, Kent’s second to last. He watches Kent’s playing style wrap around Zimmermann’s like a grapevine as the games progress into their final season, following it up towards the sun, until suddenly Kent is alone and the trellis is gone.

Kent’s skill for adaptation would put a chameleon to shame. His playing goes from vibrant vine and leaf to cold, solid stone obelisk. Sure, he’s still fast as hell and has the softest hands anyone has ever seen, but Troy and Sokolov aren’t players so much as scaffolding in the one-man Kent Parson show, darting around their star.

---

“Would you fucking pass?” he cries at Harrelson, resisting the urge to reach out and strangle his defenseman. He’s already been downgraded to the third line, and he can see fourth in his future. His average ice time has gone down four minutes since last month. People are already starting to call him a bust, “I can’t keep fucking doing this!”

“Berenger,” Gerhard snaps from up above, not even deigning to look down. “One more word out of you, and you’re benched.”

Harrelson doesn’t look at him. Augustin knows he’s been benched already.

---

He shakes his head furiously and closes his laptop. The Aces played around Kent like planets orbiting a sun. The Aeros played around Augustin like they were skirting someone who coughed without covering their mouth. It’s not the same.

They play Minnesota on the 2nd of January, and Augustin skips the optional skate because he has to go see his fuckwad shrink, Dr. Tidey, who’s built like a linebacker because apparently he was one during his undergrad. Sometimes, Augustin wonders if they gave him a psychologist who’s six-foot-four and juiced up just in case he snaps one day during a session.

He’s gotten pretty close a couple times. Dr. Tidey’s not exactly the most subtle or accommodating therapist in the world, but then again, Augustin doesn’t have a great sample size.

“Anything else you want to talk about?” Tidey asks after Augustin spends a half-hour begrudgingly discussing his relationship with his father with a similar feeling to getting teeth pulled. His tone is purposeful. Augustin smiles blandly at him.

“Well, Dr. Clean, since you’re asking, I think my captain’s been replaced by an evil body double version of himself.”

“Okay,” Tidey sighs, taking his glasses off. They’re comically small in his hands. “Fine. Go.”

If there’s one good thing about Tidey’s utterly useless anger management exercises, it’s that Augustin can apply them seamlessly to forgetting the feeling of Kent’s mouth on his skin, the hot well of desire low in his stomach that spikes whenever he sees Kent in a backwards baseball cap or the black dry-fit shirt some of the Aces wear under their gear, or the way his heart skips a beat when they make a beautiful set of passes that ends with the puck in the net and Kent fucking glows.

Seamlessly probably isn’t the right word, but it’s the one he’s using.

He knows that if there was ever a time to move out, it’s now. He’s still got half a season left, and with the trade deadline approaching, it’s looking less and less likely that he’ll be gone by March. It’s better for both of them if Augustin just bites the bullet now. He has a real estate agent and a few nice, already furnished places lined up, all in other buildings closer to the arena and practice facility, and moving out would be easy given how few items he actually owns.

On the other hand, with the amount of points he’s racking up, his trade value has never been higher and they’re currently barely courting a wild-card spot. There’s still a long way to go.

That’s the excuse he uses to keep occupying Kent’s guest bedroom, and Kent never mentions that he wants Augustin to leave. So he stays.

He still makes breakfast every morning for both of them, because his mother taught him how to cook the summer before he left for Rouyn-Noranda out of fear that his billet mother would be negligent or worse, too Anglo to cook like she did. Now he does it out of habit; the same herbs, the same techniques, although his mother would never touch protein powder if her life depended on it. Besides, Kent’s both negligent and Anglo, so he qualifies.

That’s the one thing that’s different: usually, Kent sits on the counter or the kitchen island and cradles a cup of coffee, legs swinging as he blabbers on about something entirely unrelated to hockey, and watches Augustin whisk eggs and chop vegetables or fruit. Now, he stays sitting on a barstool on the opposite side of the island, making polite conversation as Augustin slings him an omelet and a protein shake.

“You know,” Kent says through a mouthful of egg and mushroom, his hair mussed from sleep, “I kinda miss the bagged stuff sometimes. Like the bagged omelets.”

Augustin experiences a moment of deep self-reflection about the man he chose to kiss full on the mouth, and who he unfortunately continues to want to kiss full on the mouth, mostly against his own will, “That’s so fucking disgusting, don’t even talk to me.”

Kent grins with a piece of cilantro stuck between his teeth, and Augustin realizes with a swoop in his stomach that he might be in a little deeper than he thought. He takes a sip of coffee to hide the flush on his face, and sets about doing the dishes.

He washes them by hand even though Kent has a state-of-the-art dishwasher, because they don’t have one at home in the Baie and he’s a creature of habit. He can hear Kent scrolling through his phone on the couch, and there’s a Rangers game playing on the TV in the background. He listens to the play-by-play. All three New York teams are at the bottom of their respective divisions, but the East is always tougher competition and the Rangers are very different from how they were when he played with them.

“Hey,” Kent says casually from the couch. Almost too casually, as if the whole thing is as artificial as everything else Kent has going on, “They’re celebrating Tim Goldman’s thousandth game tomorrow.”

---

“Hey, Little Bear,” Goldie grins at him, ruffling his hair as he sits, “You’re getting skinny. Are you eating enough?”

“I eat fine,” Augustin retorts, digging into the mountain of pasta and chicken on his plate. Goldie levels him with a skeptical look, and he sighs, “It’s just depressing eating alone sometimes at night. Do you ever get that feeling?”

“Sure. Come over for dinner tonight,” Goldie says, patting him solidly on the back. “Fuck it, come over whenever you want, kid. You don’t have to eat alone if you don’t want to.”

---

“Augustin!”

He looks up. “What?”

Kent’s not sitting anymore; he’s standing up, and as pale as a corpse, lips parted, “Jesus, Gus. Your fucking hand.”

Augustin looks back down at the sink and realizes that he dropped the plate he was holding, and that a shard of it is embedded in the meat of his palm, blood leaking around the white piece of porcelain. He pulls it out without really thinking about it, and the pain brings him back to reality.

Stupid, stupid, stupid-

The cut’s not that deep, and he presses a wad of paper towels against it before Kent can come over. “I’m fine. Do you have a first aid kit?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and for a moment, he’s himself and not the facsimile he’s been wearing for the last few days. “Yeah, I’ll be right back.”

Augustin keeps pressure on the cut until it stops bleeding as much. Luckily it's on his top hand, so as long as he adjusts the way he holds the knob of his stick, his play won’t be affected. “Sorry about the plate.”

“Fuck the plate, Gus,” Kent says as he takes Augustin’s hand and carefully applies butterfly bandages to the shallow cut. His palm is warm and solid against Augustin’s knuckles as he makes sure the wound is closed. “It’s from Ikea, I don’t give a shit about the plate.”

Augustin’s very aware of their proximity, and he has to swallow a sound when Kent draws away to wash his hands and put away the bright red first aid kit. This is his cross to bear, or whatever the saying is. He wraps his palm in a length of bandage to keep it clean, and goes to get his bag for the flight to New York.

He ends up texting Angelique about it, as he inevitably does with all things: I kissed someone on new years that I wasn’t supposed to

His phone buzzes almost immediately: Whore. Who was it?

Me: I can’t say, but it wasn’t my smartest decision. I don’t know what to do.

Soeur: Holy God, it was someone on your team, wasn’t it?

He hits the call button immediately. She picks up on the first ring, her tone teasing, “Hallo? No, I’m sorry, we don’t sell leather harnesses.”

“How the fuck did you know?” he hisses in French, because he’s separated from Kent by two inches of plywood and he’s not really in the mood for her stand-up comedy routine. His heart is going a thousand miles a minute, “Christ, Angie, is there something on the internet? Does someone-”

“August,” her voice grows soothing, as solidly cool and logical as their father always wished Augustin himself could have been, “No, there’s nothing on the internet. I just know you. If you are freaking out about kissing a boy, it would be someone you know, and you only know other hockey players. Where are you?”

He sighs, flopping onto the bed. All of his bones hurt somehow, and his palm throbs, lances of heat with every beat of his heart as he presses it against his stomach, “Packing for the road trip in New York.”

“You're at home? So why are we speaking French? We always- Oh.” Angelique’s voice goes quiet, and Augustin feels his spine go as taut as a tightrope, or a bowstring. It's a self-preservation instinct, pure and simple, deeply ingrained since he popped out of the womb and she would dress him up like one of her dolls and smuggle him into school for show-and-tell.

“Oh? What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, or you wouldn’t have said it.”

“Well,” Angelique sighs, “It’s Kent Parson, isn’t it?”

Augustin squeezes his eyes shut, throwing an elbow on top of them for good measure. He swallows the urge to vomit, “how can you possibly know that?”

“Only because I’m your sister, August,” Angelique says, her voice sympathetic, “I understand, by the way. He’s beautiful. Too young for me-

“Aw, fucking gross-”

“-but I have eyes, and don’t even get me started on his stickhandling and offensive zone positioning. Did he kiss you back?”

Augustin can still feel the pressure of it on his lips, like a ghost. For a moment, a prolonged, perfect moment in time, Kent seemed like he wanted it just as much as he had, no matter what he said. But in the end, he still walked out the door.

“He doesn’t want me.”

“That’s not what I asked.” When it becomes clear that Augustin either can’t or won’t answer her, the difference between the two negligible and unknown even to himself, she sighs, “Well, then he’s fucking stupid. You’re a catch.”

He gratefully accepts the opportunity to let his voice go dry, “Thanks.”

“I’ll kill him the next time I see him, for breaking your heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart, Angie. Give me some fucking credit,” he checks his watch and sucks in a breath through his teeth, “Alright, I have to go. Sorry to call you on your lunch break.”

“Ah, English now that you’re trying to worm your way out. I see how it is," her voice is sardonic, “Fine, Augustin. Listen, I saw what’s happening at the Islanders’ game tomorrow-”

---

He stares up at the banner hanging over the main entrance of Sysco Center. It’s a massive portrait of him in the navy Aeros home jersey, holding his stick across his shoulders with the words “Reach for the Sky” emblazoned across the bottom. By his face hovers his name and number: Augustin Berenger, #7. On each side of him are other banners: Tim Goldman, Andrei Valenksy, Brendan Harrelson, all of the household names in Houston.

“Shit, it’s a good picture of you,” Kirbs says, gnawing on a piece of gum with his hands on his hips. He squints into the sun peeking out from behind the stadium, “Look at you, up there with all the guys. Fucking congratulations.”

“You’ll be up there with me one day,” Augustin says, grinning as Kirbs slings a muscular arm around his neck and tows him towards the entrance, “They’ll put our fucking jerseys in the rafters, side by side. Just watch.”

---

“Augustin? Did you hear me?”

“It’s fine,” Augustin says quietly. “I have it all under control. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. See you in two weeks, then.”

She hangs up before he can say anything else.

Kent’s waiting by the door when Augustin emerges with his things, a travel mug of coffee in his hand. He looks up when the door shuts, “On the phone with your sister?”

Augustin’s thanking the heavens that he didn’t get Kent that French-English dictionary after all. “Yeah, I just…haven’t called her since I flew out. Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, blowing his cat a kiss before the door shuts. “Bye, babygirl!”

“Ugh,” Augustin can’t help but mutter. Every day he wonders how he got to this point.

The entire plane ride, he is aware of every centimetre of air between his shoulder and Kent’s, all twelve of them. Kent’s casually scrolling through the Islanders’ stats, eyes narrowed in focus. They’re greener than usual today.

He catches sight of Goldman’s name and bile rises in the back of his throat. Against his will, he gags, suppressing it with a cough and a fist pressed to his mouth. Kent looks up in alarm.

“Choked on my own spit,” Augustin wheezes, taking a drink from his water bottle. Kent looks disbelieving, but turns back to his computer without saying anything.

He can feel his tongue drying out in his mouth. There’s a lot of things that he doesn’t talk about. Not to his dad, not to his mom, not to Dr. fucking Tidey who’s a mandated reporter according to the state of Nevada, and not Kent Parson, because could you imagine how he would look at Augustin if he knew?

He can’t tell Kent about the feeling of a fist cracking across his jaw, and the genuine fear of being beaten to death there on the floor of that humid Houston bar. How he thought, as the knuckles hit his face and his limbs were too heavy to lift and block them, that this was how people were going to remember him: not a great hockey player, not a good kid, but as a bloody pulp of a teenager drinking underage and getting into shit. The anticipation and agony of waiting in the CT machine, unable to talk, slowly becoming less drunk and more hungover as they checked to make sure that his own teammate hadn’t broken his jaw.

He can’t tell Kent Parson, so deeply loved by his team and his fans and even the people who claim to hate him, what it was like to feel all of that.

But somewhere on the internet there’s a video where he happily, honestly calls Tim Goldman “a great guy, the older brother I never had.” They might play it tonight. If they do, and he has to be there…

Playing the Islanders has been hard enough since Goldman was traded, but Augustin’s made sure that he never has to face Goldman on the ice again. He’ll make up reasons to skip shifts, he’ll stay too long or too short on the ice, and he’s sure the antics have never endeared him to the Eastern Conference teams he’s played on for the last five years, but it’s a survival mechanism that works. It staves off the panic until Augustin can lock himself in a room and start hitting the walls.

But if he has to watch on the jumbotron as they commemorate the man who ruined his career before it could even start, he doesn’t know what the fuck he’ll do.

---

He has to wear a fishbowl during practices.

They don’t let him wear it for games, because then people would ask what kind of upper-body injury he actually had, and more specifically, how he might have gotten it. He’s gotten so much shit for it that he could fertilize every fucking farm in the Baie. Even fucking Kirby’s been taunting him about it. It’s the only thing he says; otherwise, their shared room is silent.

“Fuck!” He narrowly dodges a high elbow from Plaskin during a breakout drill. “You almost took my head off!”

“Sorry, Berenger,” Plaskin snarls over his shoulder as he skates away, “You told me to fucking hit harder.”

His cheeks burn as he puts his head down and follows the drill up the ice. Across the rink, he hears Goldie laugh.

---

By the time they land in New York, Augustin’s worked himself up into a full-blown panic.

It never shows on the outside. He’s cool and calm, his answers are short and clipped but that’s relatively normal for him. He doesn’t smile, but it would scare people if he did. It’s not until he gets to the hotel room and immediately locks himself in the bathroom that someone might notice that something is wrong.

It’s really a fucking shame that that someone is Kent.

There’s only so long he can pretend that he’s actually using the bathroom for its intended purpose. He runs the sink a couple of times, hits the overhead fan, and struggles to breathe evenly. When that doesn’t work, he bundles himself into the bathtub like he did when he was ten.

Here, the world is very small. He has to squeeze his legs at an acute angle to fit in the small, utilitarian tub, and his shoulders are compressed on each side as he slides down into the basin. The fan drowns out any noise with its persistent whirr. This hotel bathroom, with its non-descript beige walls and white shower curtain, could be anywhere. Montreal, Seattle, Calgary, Toledo. Anywhere but New York. Anywhere but Houston.

His hand toys with the plasticky edge of the shower curtain. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in there when Kent starts banging on the door.

“Gus? Some of the guys are going out tonight. Do you want to come?”

He doesn’t say anything. The world is still too big.

“Gus, are you okay in there?”

He wants to ignore it, and he almost does, until Kent hits the door harder, so hard that the hinges rattle, and shouts, “Augustin!”

The urgency of his tone, the sheer panic tearing through it, sends him scrambling out of the tub. He wrenches open the door to see Kent with his fist raised, panting as if he’s just run a four-minute mile. His eyes widen when he sees Augustin standing in the doorway, suit all akimbo and hair sticking up in the back from lying against the white plastic, and Augustin’s so shocked to find tears in them that his own fucking freakout is momentarily non-existent.

“Fuck,” Kent says, his voice weak, “Fuck, you’re okay, you’re-” he swallows loudly and shakes his head, “Fuck, you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Augustin repeats. Kent nods, stumbling back until he can sit on the bed, pale as a ghost for the second time today. The second he sits down, the concern is replaced by vibrant anger, so quickly that Augustin’s neck hurts from the whiplash. He springs back up.

“Why the fuck did you do that?”

“I was just…” his mouth opens and closes a few times before he manages to say, “Sitting in the bathtub.”

Kent rakes his fingers through his hair, a humourless laugh escaping his mouth, “Jesus fucking Christ, Augustin, you were in there for almost an hour, you weren’t answering my texts, you-” he shakes his head, “Fucking forget it.”

He slumps back over to his side of the room, face stony, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why he’s upset. Sometimes, it takes an idiot.

Augustin bites back a curse. If the rumours are to be believed, and he’s starting to think some of them are, Kent was barely eighteen when he found his best friend, or whatever Jack Zimmermann was to him, half-dead on a bathroom floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter this time. He’s apologizing for a lot more than just hiding in a bathroom.

Kent doesn’t look at him from where he’s lying on his bed, the wax copy of him gone once more. His hands are locked over his stomach, slowly rising and falling.

“I just wish…” he starts, his teeth worrying his bottom lip. Augustin looks away, at the muted Schooners game on the television. They’re losing to the Canucks right now, but only by one. There’s still time.

“I just wish you thought we were friends,” Kent says awkwardly, more to the television screen than to him, and Augustin actually hears himself cough in surprise, choking on his own spit for real this time.

Are they friends? He’s not sure if they ever established that fact before Augustin pounced on him like a fucking carnivore who hadn’t eaten in weeks. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know if whatever they were had survived whatever that was. Friends trust each other. Friends care about each other. It’s a dangerous line to walk, and it’s an unfamiliar one.

Shocker to no one, Augustin doesn’t have a lot of friends.

He’s friends with Dustin Snow out of sheer circumstance, and he’s friendly enough with most of the Aces. He still calls a few of his teammates from Rouyn, but only the ones who don’t play anymore and only whenever he’s in the area. He has his sister, but that’s just depressing.

Kent’s still not looking at him.

“We’re friends,” Augustin says and manages to make it sound like a statement rather than a question, “What, did you want us to hold hands and skip together? Do you want a friendship bracelet?”

Kent’s silent for a minute, and then mulishly says, “Maybe. I like blue and green.”

“I’m not making you a fucking friendship bracelet, Parson, and I’m not braiding ribbons into your hair.”

“As if I wouldn’t look pretty. You have to give me something,” Kent retorts. Augustin bites down on what he wants to say, which is I already gave you something, and you didn’t want it.

“Like what?”

Kent looks over at him, lifting a hand to prop his head higher against the cushions. He looks tired and old, much older than twenty-four. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his phone keeps going off without him checking it.

The thing is that Augustin thinks he knows what Kent wants; Kent wants to know. Kent wants all the dark little secrets and the grime hidden in the nooks and crannies of his head. Kent wants to fix things, to take care of things. He does it with his team, he does it with his family, and Augustin is the only one that won’t let him fucking do it.

---

“Hey kid.”

Augustin looks up. He’s been sitting on the home bench for the last fifteen minutes, watching as they slowly rip the ice up for tomorrow’s basketball game or concert or whatever this arena becomes after the Aeros’ second loss in a row. Goldie looks down at him, putting a hand gently on his shoulder.

“You've been here the whole time?”

“Yeah.”

Goldie sits next to him with a sigh, their legs pressed together as they watch the ice get broken up into little bits. “What’s with the face?”

“I feel like I failed this team,” Augustin replies glumly, kicking his feet back and forth. “I fucked up so many times today.”

“Yeah,” Goldie laughs, elbowing him gently on the arm, “You did. But there are a lot worse ways to fuck up than that, kid. I promise. You’ll get there eventually.”

“I should be there now.”

Goldie laughs at that, throwing his head back. “You’re not going to be there for a long, long time. Give it a few years and then come back and complain.” He gets up and stretches out his arms languidly before offering Augustin a hand. “C’mon. We’re gonna go drink our sorrows away.”

Augustin accepts the hand, and lets it pull him up.

---

“Tim Goldman.”

Kent’s hand freezes halfway to the remote. The Canucks just scored an empty-net goal, which means that Seattle is done for the night. There’s still a minute left, but it’s not worth the risk of letting the Canucks get another empty-netter. They’ll just run down the clock with some passing and take the two points. They sorely need it.

“When I was on the Aeros, I had a…there were problems. With Tim Goldman. That's why they traded me.”

There’s still a Kings-Flyers game about to go to overtime. The Kings and Flyers are doing about as well as each other, so the game will be relatively even. It’s the best way to gauge strengths and weaknesses, watching evenly-matched teams duke it out.

“I don’t think I can play tomorrow, but I don’t know how to avoid it.”

The Kings are having a more consistent season than the Flyers are, in terms of their playing, but the Flyers have a lot more marketable talent. Their defensive core needs a little bit of work, but their forwards are better. It’s going to be hard to beat the Kings’ goalies, though, no matter who starts in net.

“Okay,” Kent says quietly, sitting up with a rustle of sheets. “You don’t want to play.”

“I can’t play.”

He’s been using Dr. Tidey’s anger management techniques for whatever strange Kent-shaped cobweb is clinging to him because it does not work on the anger. The scar tissue is too deep, too inflamed with nerves and grown-over skin that Augustin has let fester. It’s like a fox with its tail caught in a trap, lashing out at anything and everything that approaches it. He is not a violent man by nature, but if he looks at Goldman, he’s going to start hitting and he’s not going to be able to stop.

“You can’t play,” Kent says quietly. His phone dings again, insistently, but he ignores it. They stare at each other for a few moments, while the glaring lights of the television paint their faces ghastly colors. Augustin feels unreal, like his skin is coming apart at the seams.

“You could break curfew tonight,” Kent finally suggests. “Be a healthy scratch.”

---

“Nah, man, we have a game tomorrow,” Augustin laughs, still tipsy from the sheer amount of vodka he’s going to have to sweat out at morning skate, “I don’t want to go to a fucking nightclub anyways.”

“Kirby’s going, so you’re going,” Goldie replies, shoving him towards the bar’s door where Kirby is nervously waiting alongside the woman he met today, who must be at least a dozen years older than him, “Besides, you need to get laid!”

There’s a sheen of sweat on Goldie’s exposed collarbone. Augustin can’t help but look at it. “Dude, we won’t make it back in time, I’ll be a healthy scratch-”

Suddenly, he’s seeing the collarbone up close and personal, crushed against Goldie’s torso by an arm as the man speaks low in his ear, “Listen, rookie, is there something fucking wrong with you? She’s gonna get you into the hottest club in the city. Every red-blooded fucking man your age would kill for that.”

The arm is tight around his neck, so tight that he can barely breathe. Augustin may be sheltered and cold from being up on a pedestal for so long, but he knows a threat when he hears one. “Alright, whatever.”

He’s a healthy scratch the next day against the Aces, but at least Goldie pats him sympathetically on the back about it.

---

“I’m not giving him the satisfaction,” Augustin replies tightly. Kent nods. They’re hockey players. They are nothing if not saddled with pride.

“We’ll figure something out,” he says, and then switches the channel to the original Michael Bay Transformers movie. Augustin’s older now than he was back then, but shiny explosions and loud noises still manage to suitably distract him.

He wakes up the next morning for their practice to find Kent already on his computer, furiously scrolling through a website he won’t let Augustin see. They don’t say anything about what happened the night before, and Augustin’s starting to wonder if he’s hallucinated the whole damn thing when Kent unceremoniously drags him into the small visitor’s first-aid room in Barclay Center after their morning practice. His hand is warm around Augustin’s wrist.

“Hey, Frank!”

Frank looks up from his tablet, already wearing a face of intense suspicion. Augustin just shrugs wordlessly. He has a few guesses as to why he’s here, but he doesn’t particularly like any of them.

“Augustin cut his hand,” Kent says, forcing Augustin to stick out his bandaged hand, “And it’s making him play like shit.”

“Uh, fuck you,” Augustin says, because even if Kent’s trying to get him out of this, he can’t help but bristle at the insinuation that such a tiny fucking cut would make his play that much worse. Kent glares at him. “I mean, uh, ow.”

Frank unravels the bandage and examines the cut. It’s no longer butterfly-bandaged, but it's redder and more inflamed than it was yesterday. Augustin already knows that this is a losing battle: he’s played games with ankle fractures and lost teeth, and during last year’s playoff series when he was with the Habs, he publicly admitted to playing with a broken finger. Frank knows that he’s full of shit.

“Frank,” Kent says very seriously, “Do you think Augustin can play tonight with his hand like this?”

Frank sighs, relinquishing Augustin’s hand back to him, “Kent, if Gus here was a high schooler trying to get out of gym class, maybe I’d consider it. But you two are fucking professional athletes. You’re asking me to commit serious insurance fraud and medical malpractice.”

“I’m not technically asking you to do anything.” Kent says sunnily.

“Dude, that means nothing to the Nevada State Medical Board,” Frank shakes his head, “What’s the big deal, anyways? Don’t you wanna play, Gus?”

“Of course I do,” Augustin lies immediately, “Parson’s a fucking…Mother Goose, or whatever.”

“Parson wants to win,” Kent immediately sniffs, all uppity, “Parson wants his linemates to play at their peak, and Parson’s linemate on the left is letting a cut and a headache affect his passing.”

“Headache?” Frank says sharply. Augustin can see Kent’s shit-eating grin out of the corner of his eye, and if he wasn’t implicated in the lie, he would’ve been somewhat impressed by how casually it comes out.

“Yeah, it’s nothing,” he says, “I, uh…hit my head getting out of the car yesterday morning.”

He technically did, but only hard enough to cause a loud thunk that made Kent laugh. It’s not his fault that Kent’s car is ridiculous, low and sleek and with doors too small for any reasonably sized hockey player. It’s enough, though, for Frank to put him through concussion protocol. Augustin has to suffer through fifteen minutes of evaluation, half of which he knows enough to rig, and half of which is completely out of his hands.

By the end, Frank is looking at him suspiciously, but he must have done just poorly enough on his evaluation to trigger a call to a neurologist.

“Hey,” Augustin says as they wait in the medical room for the local neurologist for the Islanders to arrive. “Have you ever considered that maybe it’s a bad fucking idea to fake an injury that would put me on LTIR?”

“What do you mean, you’re doing great,” Kent says easily, kicking his feet up onto the exam table so that his body forms a ninety degree angle. “You just gotta walk that line, nice and easy. It’s gonna be fine.”

“You would say that,” Augustin grunts, fiddling with his hoodie strings, “It’s not your ass.”

“I have a great ass,” Kent sniffs.

“I know, I-”

He stops, and Kent stops, and they both stare at each other blankly. The room’s air is cold and still, unmoveable.

Augustin’s wondering how he can magically unstep in the puddle he’s just put his toe in when there’s a cheerful “Hello!” from the entrance, and Frank comes in with a round, bald man wearing a white coat and a truly impressive mustache. Kent looks over at the interruption, and the sheer terror on his face melts into childlike glee faster than dry ice dissolving.

“Holy hell,” he says, springing out of his chair and giving Augustin a moment to catch his breath, “Dr. Gino?”

“Kenny P,” the doctor laughs, patting him on the shoulder, “How you been, kid? You’re lookin’ good!”

“I-”

“Noise,” Augustin says mildly, because he’s supposed to be playing it up for the doctor, and Kent shuts his mouth with a click.

“Sorry, Gus.”

“You two know each other?” He asks as Dr. Gino, if that is his real name, sets up his things. Kent being from New York is broadly publicized; there’s an urban legend that he learned to skate in Rockefeller Square with homemade skates, like some sort of orphaned street urchin rather than a kid whose mom had a stable job and bought him second-hand gear. Still, he’s never seen Kent’s inner New Yorker come out this strong and fast.

“Dr. Gino took care of me during my first concussion,” Kent grins, “What was I? Nine?”

“Just about,” Dr. Gino laughs, scrubbing up Kent’s hair. “Lost an edge and careened into the boards. I was finishing my residency at Bellevue at the time when they rolled him in still wearing his gear. What was it you said to me?”

Kent’s cheeks flush, “Uh, I don’t remember-

“Oh! It was, ‘back the fuck up, doctor man, I saw on the TV that they’re gonna cut the helmet off my head. I’d rather you cut my head off!’” Dr. Gino chortles. Kent is as red as a fire engine.

“Oh?” Augustin says as Dr. Gino waves a flashlight in his eye, “Tell me more about nine-year-old Kent.”

“Oh my God,” Kent says miserably. Dr. Gino doesn’t pay him any attention.

“Well, after he recovered, he brought me a present that he told me his mom said “wasn’t polite” but that he thought I would like…”

Dr. Gino talks for all fifteen minutes of the evaluation, lengthy anecdotes interspersed with his actual instructions. He’s so genial that a couple of times Augustin almost forgets that he’s supposed to fake being injured, and just manages to put on a symptom or two.

“You’re not concussed,” Dr. Gino says mildly after his story ends with Kent’s drafting by Rimouski and subsequent removal from Dr. Gino’s clientele. Augustin feels his gut plummet. “But you do have slightly delayed voluntary motor responses and slightly impaired vision which could impede your ability to play properly. Whether or not you should play is up to the discretion of your managers, but I would recommend sitting for one game to see if your symptoms improve or not.”

“And if I don’t?” Augustin asks. Dr. Gino shrugs.

“It’s a gamble you’re going to have to take. If you sit and get better, maybe you’re a little embarrassed for a few days. If you play and it gets worse…”

He’s giving Augustin a strange, knowing look. If he works with athletes for a living, there’s no doubt in Augustin’s mind that he’s seen many of them trying to play down an injury to get more game time. It’s only a little bit of reverse engineering to recognize the opposite effect.

“Thanks, Dr. Brunelli,” Frank says, “Fax us the report, will you?”

They both leave, and Augustin has to wipe his palms on his sweatpants. Dr. Gino gave him a way out, but if he takes it, he looks soft. Weak.

---

He throws up again in the bucket, and everyone else winces at the sound. His lips are cracked, heat and cold coming in waves across his body as he wipes his hand over his mouth and whispers, “I don’t think I can play.”

“He’s dehydrated,” one of the trainers murmurs, “And his fever’s brushing a hundred degrees. I hate to say it, but you should scratch him.”

“Fucking soft,” Gerhard mutters, taking his phone out of his pocket, “They fucking gave me the flimsiest rookie in the goddamn show. Get the kid back to the hotel, he’s done for the roadie. Berenger, I’m cutting your minutes when we get back. If you’re not going to work for it, maybe someone else will.”

He leaves before Augustin can protest.

---

They call him and Kent into the hotel’s conference room an hour later, and Augustin feels his gut knotting when he walks in wearing one of Kent’s baseball caps to shield his eyes from the light to find the assistant manager Jerome and Coach Wilson standing next to the speakerphone.

When they got the call, Kent looked at him dead in the eyes, and said: “When the time comes, let me take the blame.” Augustin doesn’t know what he means by that, because he was getting a baseball cap jammed on his head at the same time, but it’s the longest that Kent’s made eye-contact with him in days.

“They’re here,” Jerome says shortly. He’s a brick of a man, short and squat, and he mops his brow angrily as Augustin steps further into the room and attempts to hold back his very real nausea. He longs for the plastic embrace of the bathtub.

“Augustin. How are you doing, son?” the phone says brusquely.

Hollis St. Martin is as Quebecois as Augustin is, and if they could have this whole conversation in French, it would all be much easier. Augustin both lies and cusses better in French than he does in English, which is a language with nowhere to hide.

“I’ve been better, sir,” he says, his voice quiet, “Am I playing tonight?”

“No the fuck you’re not,” Kent jumps in wearily, as if they’ve been having this fight for an hour already, “Hollis, I swear, you’d think we’re depriving him of fucking oxygen the way he was whinging in our room for the last hour. Is it too late to swap with someone?”

When the time comes, let me take the blame.

Kent was twenty years old when they made him the captain of the Las Vegas Aces, just in time to participate in the lockout negotiations. Augustin doesn’t know how they went: he was too busy fucking around Switzerland trying not to remember that the Aeros had cast him off. He does know the criticisms that the Aces got; Kent was too young, too smug, too vicious, and too egotistical to make a good captain. A captain has to command respect, care for his teammates, direct them towards wins and console them after losses. He’s the first one into the fray and the last one to leave the rink at night. Frat-boy Kent Parson was incapable of that, or so everyone said.

It only took one season to prove all the talking heads wrong. Kent is a captain like he was born to be one.

Augustin realizes he’s been staring when Kent looks over at him and the apples of his cheeks go vaguely pink.

“It’s a wild card spot,” Jerome is arguing. “Berenger and Parson are the first line, I mean, who am I supposed to pull up that can do what they do?”

“You can pull Greenwall up to the third and play Bloom on alternating shifts with me,” Augustin offers on sheer instinct, because he’s been thinking that Bloom’s being underserved by his other linemates for the last couple of games and there’s never such thing as too much depth. Kent glares at him, like stop helping.

“Parson, are you on board with that?” Hollis asks.

“No, I’m not on board with fucking up the career of the best winger I’ve ever played with because he might not have a concussion,” Kent says hotly, leaning in close to the speaker, “If he passes the evaluation tomorrow, he can destroy his brain all he wants, but he’s not fucking playing tonight.”

The room is silent for a moment, before Hollis dryly says, “Is that all?”

“Yup,” Kent says, and sits petulantly in one of the creaky hotel rolling chairs.

“It’s a big game,” Jerome argues, bracing his hands on the table, “It’s a fair few fucking points that we could use to put distance between us and Anaheim. Berenger will help us win.”

“Do you think you can play, Augustin?” Hollis asks. Augustin’s tongue feels swollen, as if a bee has stung it.

“I, uh…I don’t know, Mr. St. Martin. I want to. But if it’s best for the team if I sit this one out, I don’t want to jeopardize anything.”

Sitting on the sidelines watching other people play is his worst fucking nightmare, and it’s one he’s lived over and over before. There’s only one thing worse than that, and it’s losing this fucking game for his team because he knows he won’t be able to control himself.

“Coach,” Hollis says through the phone, “Everyone’s given their two cents. What do you say?”

Wilson is silent, and Augustin’s relatively sure he’s going to be strapping on pads and at center ice in three hours time when he abruptly says, “If Parson says that Berenger can’t play, then he can’t play. If you make me put him on the bench, I won’t skate him.”

“Jesus,” Hollis’ sigh rustles through the phone, “Fine, we’re scratching you, Berenger. Upper-body, day-to-day. You better win this without him, Parson.”

“Don’t I always?” Kent says winningly. Augustin can’t help it: he laughs. Kent looks over at him, and then they’re stifling laughter into their hands, shoulders shaking.

“Crisse,” Hollis grunts, and then there’s the distinct click of him hanging up.

“Alright, get back upstairs, Berenger,” Jerome sighs, “If you fall asleep or touch a single electronic device, I will kick your ass. Fucking hell, I should’ve gone into rugby.”

Kent gets dressed quickly, since most of the team is already on the bus, which means he doesn’t duck into the washroom to do it. Augustin keeps his eyes calmly trained on his phone even though it’s nothing he’s never seen before.

“Don’t let anyone catch you doing that,” Kent says, struggling to tie his tie. He’s knotting it backwards, and Augustin just can’t help himself. He stands from the bed.

“Stop that,” he bats Kent’s hands away from the tie, and straightens the length of green silk out. It makes Kent’s eyes a pearly grey in comparison, his iris flecked with blue freckles. They must look like a sight: Augustin with his hair ruffled from the cap and dressed in a hoodie and sweatpants in front of a Kent who is the most well-groomed he gets at any one point in time. Their foreheads are inches apart.

“Hey, Parson,” he says quietly, and quickly realizes that was where his train of thought ended.

“Yeah?” Kent replies as Augustin lifts the knot higher, towards his neck. His voice is feathery. His breath ghosts Augustin’s cheek, and a shiver runs up his spine.

It would be so easy. One tug, one move, and they would be right back where they left off. He wants to, so badly that it hurts. Kent’s looking up at him, lips slightly parted, and a single blond lock falls across his forehead.

“Thanks,” Augustin finally says, and then steps away, “If you lose, I’ll kill you.”

“That’s not very thankful,” Kent says gravely, and pats him on the shoulder on his way out. “I’ll get a goal for you, Gus. Just watch.”

He really has no choice. He can’t sleep, so he just watches the minutes tick by on the clock as they get closer and closer to game time, the television on in the background, muted and close-captioned in case Frank feels like ambushing him. He sees them receive the news that he’s not going to be playing in real time, during the pre-show. Some of the pundits look almost disappointed.

“Eat me, Elliotte Friedman,” he mutters when the panel makes a pithy joke about Kent being handicapped by his absence. His quiet voice is still too loud in the silent, cavernous hotel room.

They’re doing a spotlight on him before the game begins, a clearly impromptu dissection of his career instead of what everyone ought to be talking about, which is a veteran’s thousandth game at home. Augustin can’t help but grin as he unmutes it. Goldie’s going to be furious.

“After all, despite his injury today, Augustin Berenger is making far more of an impact now than in any of his previous seasons. He’s on track to break a hundred points, which is a far cry from his usual struggle to break sixty. I don’t think we’ve ever seen such a drastic improvement between seasons.”

“Honestly, improvement’s not what I would call it. Berenger’s always played this well, or at least close to it. I think the biggest difference is that the Aces are actually treating him as the star player he is, and they’re making full use of his compatibility with Kent Parson. I mean, take a look at these passes and shots that the two of them manage to pull off. That’s a combination of skill and chemistry that we haven’t seen since the Sedin twins were in their prime.”

“Makes you wonder what he’s been doing up until this point.”

“Aw, fuck you, Elliotte.”

“Well, we’ve always heard, you know, the rumours that he caused a lot of problems in the locker room, but prominent Aces like Jeffrey Troy and Ethan Cross seem to have nothing but good things to say about him. I think what we’re witnessing is the return of the Augustin Berenger we all expected to see, the one we only got for about three months in his rookie season with the Aeros-”

Augustin hits the mute button again. The sense of victory he wants to feel isn’t there. It still feels like Goldie has won: he’s going to be on the ice tonight, he’s going to play the game that Augustin loves, and Augustin’s stuck in his hotel room because he’s too fucking weak and emotional to restrain himself and play a good game even after seven years.

He almost shuts the television off completely when the pre-game show begins, when there’s a knock at the door. He shuts off the lights on the way to the door in case it’s Frank, peeking through the peephole to see who it is.

It’s not Frank.

“Hello?” he stares down at the very short woman standing patiently in front of him. She’s around fifty years old, with threads of silver in her dark hair and a wide, kindly lined face with tiny rectangular glasses perched on her nose. She’s wrapped in so many layers of colourful knit dusted in snow that her stature is impossible to decipher. “Euh, hi?”

She beams up at him, “Well! You really are more handsome in-person, Augustin, but don’t you know it’s rude to make someone wait out in the hallway?”

He blinks at her, hand tightening over the doorknob, “Uh, I’m sorry, but who are you? I’m not really supposed to have visitors, I don’t think you’re supposed to be…here.”

The woman laughs, full-bellied and throaty, and pats him on the arm, “Oh, sweetheart, I’m Constance Parson, but you can call me Connie. I believe this is my son’s room?”

Augustin feels his throat dry out. This is Kent’s mom. He looks down and curses in his head when all he’s wearing is his ratty old Rouyn-Noranda hoodie and Aces sweatpants covered in cat hair. Moms usually hate him, either because he looks mean and troublesome or sloppy, and today he’s sure that he looks both. “Yeah, it is, sorry. It’s just- Kent’s not here right now. He’s at the rink getting ready for our game.”

“Oh, nonsense, I’m not here for Kent. I brought you soup!” She holds up a takeout container as she comes in, setting it neatly on the nearby table. “It’s wonton soup, and now I know I may look like an uptight old white lady, but we used to live near Chinatown when Kent was a kid, so we know our Chinese food.”

Augustin just watches, door still ajar, as she tosses her scarf and cardigan over the back of the room’s armchair and sits primly, her canvas tote bag landing on the floor with a thud, “You know, I heard you were sick on the TV, and the ladies at the shelter were kind enough to let me go early, they love you and they’re so sad you’re not playing today, and- Augustin, you’re going to let in all the cold air!”

He wonders if he’s actually sick and starting to hallucinate as he closes the door with a snap. “Madame Parson-”

“Ohh, madame,” she coos, taking a skein of yarn and some knitting needles out of the bag, “That’s lovely. Come on, love, the soup is still hot and the game is about to start!”

“Uh,” Augustin says again as he ambles over, “Did Kent tell you…anything?”

“Well, I told him that he was supposed to invite you over during this trip, but he appears to have forgotten,” Connie shakes her head, knitting needles clicking, “So I’m going to conveniently forget things too. Do you call your mother, Augustin?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” Connie sniffs, motioning to the bed. “Sit, eat the soup.”

Augustin sits and eats the soup.

Connie doesn’t say anything as the puck drops, her needles clicking mechanically as they both watch the screen with the sound down low. The Aces get off to a rough start: Kent is having trouble adjusting to Bloom’s shorter frame and penchant for cherry-picking near the offensive blue line. There’s a few turnovers and close calls that almost send his face into a pillow in dismay.

“Don’t,” he says under his breath when he sees Kent and Smitty set up for a play that Bloom has never done before, “Don’t.”

Like he can hear it, Kent diverts into an easier play halfway through, catching Bloom on the far side of the net. The puck still goes wide, since the pass landed on the toe of Bloom’s stick rather than directly on the tape.

“Fuck!”

“Augustin,” Connie chides. Augustin had nearly forgotten that she was there.

“Sorry-”

“If you’re going to use those words, at least put your back into it,” Connie finishes wryly. Augustin can’t help the grin that spreads across his face as he turns back to the TV.

“Goldman with the puck, up the boards- Oh! Parson lays a hit on Tim Goldman, and Goldman’s a bit slow to get up after that. It’s a clean hit, they’re letting play continue, but it doesn’t look like any concessions are being made by the Aces tonight for the occasion. Frisk gathers the puck and fires it on net, where it’s saved by Halak.”

“Kent Parson may be the hometown kid, but he’s not going to be making any friends in Brooklyn tonight, that’s for sure. He absolutely lays Goldman out, which is a challenge at his size, and not his typical style of play, either.”

“You have to wonder if the difference in style has anything to do with Augustin Berenger’s absence, who’s missing today with an undisclosed upper-body injury but still scheduled to play in Buffalo tomorrow.”

He doesn’t realize he’s shot to his feet until the blood rushes from his head. They show a replay: Kent’s hit is textbook, perfectly legal and almost flawless, like a bullet to the knees of Goldman’s taller, older frame. Augustin watches the back of Goldman’s head as the player crumbles, clutching his knee as Kent glides gaily away with the puck.

He looks over at Kent’s mother, who continues to knit with equal gaiety in the corner as if her son didn’t just go headhunting.

Goldman doesn’t come back on the ice for the rest of the first period, and the Islanders fans boo Kent off the ice for the break. Augustin scrambles for the phone, and has typed out a scathing message about not fighting his battles when Connie sighs and puts down her needles.

“Good, smart plays,” she says, flexing her fingers, “My son’s playing smarter since he started playing with you. Do you want some tea?”

Augustin says, “Sure.”

He hits backspace and instead writes: you need to play consistently.

He gets a text back almost immediately: ur not supposed to be on ur phone

Me: I’m still waiting for my goal, by the way

K. Parson: patience is a virtue :)))

Me: Pass better

The next period, Kent hits just as much as he did the previous period, and he does pass better. It gets Smitty a goal within a minute. Connie smiles as Augustin whoops, watching as the Aces crash into each other by the boards onscreen, and says, “He broke a finger celebrating too hard one time. He asked us to splint it with popsicle sticks because he saw it once on MASH, that old show about the Korean War. Did you know he loved MASH as a kid? Used to dress up like Corporal Klinger.”

“Tell me more,” Augustin says, “Please.”

“Well, once he tried to make his own gin still in the back of his elementary school gymnasium…”

The period is the best twenty minutes of the game, partly because Augustin gets to see some of Kent’s baby photos during the breaks, and partly because Kent scores a messy goal with three minutes left, and points directly into the camera as he skates by the bench, a shit-eating grin on his face as he mouths something. That’s for you.

Me: garbage goal. Score me a better one.

K. Parson: ur so demanding when u cant play

Me: And you’re still passing like a fucking naked mole rat.

“Augustin,” Connie says lightly, “Can you stop texting my son for a moment and help me untangle this yarn?”

He can easily see how Kent came to be the person he is as he sits on the floor next to Connie’s chair, carefully picking apart a tangled skein of forest-green wool that’s somehow wound itself into a thousand knots. Connie’s got strength etched in every bone in her body, every movement, and yet she is somehow the softest, gentlest presence Augustin’s ever been in the same room with. It’s the kind of softness that grows despite adversity.

And she’s beautiful. She’s got Kent’s eyes and dimpled smile, sharpened by dark hair and a face that’s aging gracefully. In the fine lines, he can see some of what Kent might look like twenty, thirty years from now.

“Did Kent get his hair from his dad?” he asks as he picks apart a particularly tight knot and curses his short nails. Connie smiles.

“Yes, and my brother. Kent looks like a split between them both,” she laughs, “Makes it a little easier for me, I think. If Kent grew up to look exactly like his father, I don’t think I would’ve been able to be quite so strict with him.”

Augustin is silent for a moment, before he says, “He’s been a great captain, Madame Parson. Your son, I mean. I know you probably already are, but you should be proud of him.”

Connie stops in her knitting for a moment to look down at him through the pink-rimmed glasses. “Thank you, Augustin. That means a lot, from you.” She reaches out to pat his hand, “You know, I’ve known you a lot longer than you’ve known me.”

“You have?”

“When Kent was first drafted to Rimouski,” Connie says, resuming her knitting, “I was there for his first game, which they won, but I had to go home before his second. He called me after it was over, all in a hissy fit. Mom, Mom, he said before I could even say hello, there’s this fuckhead on the Huskies and he wouldn’t let me or Jack score all night.”

“Oh,” Augustin mutters. He almost wants to ask if the fuckhead in question is actually him, but who else could it be? He doesn’t remember that specific game other than the fact that Kent boarded him so hard that he almost broke his knee, but he does remember being tasked on shutting down the Parson-Zimmermann line for two seasons in a row, and how difficult it had actually been. “He called me a fuckhead?”

“Only the first time,” Connie says merrily, “You were “dickface” for a while, and then “that fucking French bitch” and then you were “Augustin Berenger,”” she looks at him cheekily, “Now you’re Gus. That’s a lot of names for one person to keep track of. Now, I won’t call you fuckhead, but what do you prefer to be called?”

Augustin looks down at the tangle of yarn, “My, uh…my family calls me August. And when I was on the Huskies, they called me Summer. And, um…when I was first drafted, they called me Little Bear, after the constellation.”

---

“Haha! It's Big Bear and Little Bear!”

Harrelson loops his arms around their shoulders, shaking him and Valenksy. His finger pokes Augustin’s cheek. They just won their third game in a row, and everyone’s drunk as all hell, “Big Bear and Little Bear! Captain and future captain!”

“Get off of me,” Augustin says, laughing as he pushes away Harrelson’s face. Harrelson leaves another shot on the table for each of them as he walks away cackling at his own joke.

“To future captain,” Valenksy says, his grin wide and toothy. Their glasses clink together, and Augustin drinks.

---

“You can call me Augustin,” he decides quietly, “Or Gus is fine, too.”

“Well, Gus, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name.”

Augustin stays on the floor even as the third period comes and goes, making small talk with Connie Parson. He learns that she’s a librarian, and that Kent’s father was a construction worker before he died of lung cancer, and that she still volunteers at the same women’s shelter she once stayed at when she was younger. Augustin makes a note to write a large cheque when he gets back home.

He only vaguely notices when Kent scores a beautiful goal in overtime to send the Aces off the ice cheering, too busy listening to Connie tell him about the funding issues that the New York Public Library is currently facing. Somehow, she’s made it so that hockey doesn’t seem to matter, and somehow, it might not be the worst thing in the world. Augustin has never felt so blissfully normal in his life.

They’re on their second cup of tea each when the door’s lock clicks. Augustin scrambles upright as light and noise filter in, followed by a flushed, disheveled Kent with a baseball cap perched backwards, at odds with his suit and tie.

“Hey, Gus, I- Mom?”

“Mrs. Parson?” Augustin hears Troy's hopeful voice from the hallway, quickly echoed by the other veteran Aces, “Parse, is your mom here? Hi, Mrs. Parson!”

“Hello there Jeffrey, Vittorio, Petteri, Ethan, Nils, and oh, you must be Devon!” Connie waves gaily over her gaping, stammering son’s shoulder as she packs up her things. “Well done tonight, boys! I’m just heading out. Jeffrey, will you walk me down?”

“Mom, I can walk you down,” Kent says, his eyes still bugging out of his head. Connie levels her son with a shrewd look, a smile playing across her face.

“Jeffrey can walk me down and get me a cab just fine, sweetpea.”

“Sweetpea,” Augustin echoes. Kent shoots him a glare that would knock birds out of the sky before following his mom out. The Aces part like the Red Sea for her, and she honest-to-God pinches Kent’s cheek in front of them, eliciting a flurry of chirps that get louder as he grumpily leans down to let her kiss him on the cheek before seeing her into the elevator.

“It was lovely to speak with you, Gus,” Connie calls, waving at him. Augustin can’t help but crack a smile.

“Thanks for coming, Madame Parson.”

“Holy shit,” Smitty says gleefully, “Augustin, are you smiling?”

Kent whips his head back and forth like a tennis match is unfolding before his very eyes, trapped between the elevator doors and the doorway Augustin is standing in like a bug in a spiderweb.

“See ya soon, Parse,” Troy says, six-foot-four and arm in arm with Kent’s comically short mother as the doors slide shut and sever one of the strings.

“Everyone go away,” Kent says, despite the chirps coming from all directions, “Go away, no, I don’t care where, Cross, just take them somewhere. You!”

Augustin presses a hand to his chest with a small smirk like who, me? The team goes ‘oooh’ like a bunch of children when Kent shoves him inside the room.

“Someone’s in trouble,” Smitty sings as the door shuts behind Kent, leaving the two of them alone. Augustin has no reason to be feeling this smug, since he wasn’t even part of the game they just won, but watching Kent pace back and forth is a little satisfying.

“What…” Kent shakes his head, stuttering madly as he gestures around, “What?”

“Your mom brought me soup,” Augustin replies, crossing his arms with a smile, “She showed up before the game. I thought you called her, honestly.”

“No, I did not call her.” Kent retorts, “What did she say? What did you say? Oh God, what did she say?”

“Fuckhead,” Augustin lists, ticking them off on his fingers, “Dickface, that fucking French bitch-”

“Alright,” Kent puts up a hand, cheeks pink as strawberries. “Jesus, I should’ve known she’d do this. Actually, no I shouldn’t have, it’s insane, but she’s insane-”

“Would you relax?” Augustin says, glad that he turned the television off, because Kent’s minor meltdown where he flushes and rakes his hands through his hair is more than enough visual stimulus at once. “She just brought me soup, and we watched the game.”

Kent opens his mouth, and his phone buzzes in his pocket before he can speak. He takes it out and stares at it for eleven seconds. Augustin knows because he counts them pass by one by one on the digital clock on the bedside table before Kent pockets the phone again, face bright red.

“Jesus,” he says weakly, wresting the tie from around his neck and throwing it onto the bed. “You and my mom. Fuck. And she likes you.”

“I’m not going to make a “your mom” joke, because that’s beneath me,” Augustin says loftily, because it is and also because now that he’s actually met Kent’s mom, he doesn’t know if he can stomach it. “It was a good game. You scored me a nice goal at the end to make up for that shit one in the second period.”

“Yeah,” Kent laughs, scratching the back of his neck, “Could you hear the booing from here?”

“Well, that’s what happens when you hit a guy on his thousandth game.”

“It was a good hit,” Kent says, just like he did when they asked him about it between periods, “It was a good play. Just because it’s not one I usually make, doesn’t mean it didn’t work. It’s hockey,” his lip curls, “He’s old now. This sort of thing happens.”

“You didn’t say that last part to the journalists.”

He’s turned his back to shuck the covers off his bed when he hears Kent say: “I never liked him.”

He freezes, fiddling with the edge of a pillow, “Who?”

“You know who,” Kent says quietly. Even without looking, Augustin knows where he is in the room, as if he can sense the perpetual heat and energy rolling off Kent in waves. “I never liked him. He was a drunk asshole in his prime and now he’s bitter and washed-up. He’s going to move back to Ontario when his career is done, and nobody is going to remember him five years from now.”

“That’s gonna happen to all of us one day.”

Kent scoffs, “Not you and me.”

Not you, Augustin wants to say, but Kent has faith and optimism enough for the both of them. There’s no sense in squashing it. Kent will believe in his team until they start to believe in themselves. It’s what makes him a good captain.

And far be it from Augustin to show him how the world really works.

“It was a good game,” he says again, turning around to face Kent. Kent smiles at him, face golden in the lamplight, and God, it hurts more than anything, but Augustin can’t make himself turn away as they both get ready for bed, and tomorrow’s game, and every game after that until Augustin is gone.

They don’t say anything else for the rest of the night.

Notes:

the rat race began on monday, i fear.

i don't actually hate the islanders, i just picked the new york city team i liked less. sorry to islanders fans, but i fear i have a strange fondness for matt rempe

anyways new season of shoresy everyone strap in for how that's inevitably gonna affect me in some way

Chapter 13

Summary:

In which Kent is flustered, Jeff plays camp counselor, and Angelique Berenger comes to Las Vegas

The Aces are officially affiliated with a local minor hockey team, the Spades. Every year, they host a tournament for the kids who are more like bowling pins than actual players, so young that their helmets are a proportional third of their bodies. It used to be a separate thing from the Aces entirely, until Swoops was traded here and decided that watching kids ping-ponging off of each other was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

Kent fucking loves the Ace of Spades tournament weekend.

It’s a lot bigger now than it was when he started: minor hockey teams from across the continent send teams of all ages on the second weekend of January, because a few years ago Swoops managed to successfully trick both the tournament organizers and the rest of the Aces into letting him and the team coach the kids through their games in the round robin.

“Alright!” he says after practice one day, clipboard in hand completely at odds with the fact that his hair is a rat’s nest and his lip is bleeding from an accidental high-stick by Harley. “Ace of Spades tournament on Saturday! They’re letting me announce who gets what because I do all the fucking work in this goddamn house. Bet you all wish you got me a good Christmas present now, eh?”

Some people boo, but most of them sit forward, excited to see if they’ll be blessed with the younger players, or saddled with the older ones. Last year, Kent had to deal with a bunch of thirteen and fourteen year old boys saying the most heinous shit he’s ever heard in his life, to the point where he had to sit them down and lecture them about hockey ethics or something. He got to see their hero-worship die in real time.

Swoops did not get a birthday present that year.

“Please give me the Tykes,” he whispers, fingers crossed hard, “Please, please, please-”

“Parse, I have you, me, and Gus, and Gus’ special guest down for the U7s in the morning.”

There’s a bunch of groans, and some tape balls hit Kent on the shoulder when he cheers out loud, arms high in the air.

“Oh, fuck you,” he says to Smitty when the latter keeps booing, “I did my time with the teenagers, it’s your fucking turn. If you’re going to be mad at anyone, be mad at Troy. He puts himself with the little kids every fucking year.”

“Uh, don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Parse.”

“Can they even skate?” Augustin leans over to ask. Kent has to clamp down on the shiver that results from Augustin’s breath ghosting his neck, and pretend that it’s from excitement. Augustin’s trying, and Kent has to try as well, no matter how much he wants to grab Augustin by the lapels and drag him down onto the couch whenever he wanders sleepily out of his room. It’s for the greater good.

“No, that’s like half the fun. They just fall over, and then you pick them up, and then they fall over again. And then sometimes they ask you about how the world works and you get to just lie.”

“I don’t think you get to lie to a bunch of six year olds,” Augustin replies as he sits back against the cubby wall. “I think you choose to lie to a bunch of six year olds.”

Cross sighs when he’s assigned to the U15s with Harley and Flicker, “Great, I have to babysit a bunch of teenagers and McCandles.”

“I figured it would be good practice for when your kids are that age,” Swoops says merrily.

“My kids are three and five!”

“One more thing!” Swoops says with gusto, and Scraps produces a giant glass jar from his cubby like a magician’s assistant. The ‘banana peppers’ label is covered by a piece of masking tape that says $WEAR JAR. “Twenty bucks for the first offense, fifty bucks for each one after that.” He points directly at Augustin, “Bring cash.”

“They’re fucking kids, not nuns,” Augustin replies, arms crossed. “I’m furthering their education.”

“You’re lucky this doesn’t start until you get to the rink on Saturday, or you’d blow your whole salary by noon.” Swoops sniffs in reply. “Alright! Everyone show up on time, or I’ll fucking kill you! Talking to you, Buckley.”

“Man, you oversleep once and it fucking haunts you forever.”

Swoops releases them like the camp counselor he secretly wishes he was, and Augustin snorts a laugh when Smitty and Bloom get into a pissing match over who gets to coach the home team of their U13s and who gets saddled with the away team, all while Scraps, coaching a team from his native Chicago, just whistles merrily.

“They’re from Minnesota, you’re from Michigan. They’re basically the same fucking thing.”

“First of all, no the fuck they are not. Second of all, Michigan is closer to Vegas than fucking New Brunswick.”

“Ah, the dulcet sounds of arguing in the locker room,” Swoops says, taking Augustin’s spot as the latter goes to empty his water bottle in the bathroom. He drums his hands against his kneepads, “You and Gus haven’t been going at it as much recently, it’s been getting boring.”

“Yeah, uh,” Kent says, because what is he supposed to say?

Hey, Jeff, I know I’ve never formally come out to you, but since you were there for the fallout of Stanley-Cup-Makeout-Gate, I feel like you have a sneaking suspicion, and oh, by the way, I kissed Augustin on New Year’s because we’re both gay, and then I panicked because my last boyfriend, who I also played incredible hockey with, was driven to overdose after I said ‘I love you’ so I told him that I couldn’t kiss him again even though it’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last week and a half. Surprise! Please applaud whenever you feel like it.

He’s not really in the mood to sound any crazier than normal.

“He’s still getting over that cold or whatever it was from the New York roadie, so I don’t want to aggravate it.”

“Uh huh,” Swoops says, eyes narrowed. “Right, well, tell him not to cough on the future generation.”

“Somehow, I think he’ll manage not to.” Kent replies as Augustin returns with an empty water bottle and his hair held back by his wavy plastic headband. It’s starting to get long enough that the feathered edges barely brush his cheekbones. “Ready to go?”

“Me? Dude, you still have half your gear on,” Augustin replies. Kent looks down, and yeah, that’s about right for how his week is going. He leans down to untie his skates and hide the heat rising in his face.

“Troy, get out of my fucking seat before I send you a little wooden horse.”

“Remember when chirps didn’t require an advanced literature degree? We used to be a real country.”

He knows he’s been acting strange, and the only reason that no one has called him on it yet is that the first person to usually call him on it is also acting highly peculiar in every possible way. They don’t fight, they don’t chirp each other, and every time Augustin looks like he wants to say something that is equal parts bitchy and endearing in that quintessentially Augustin way of his, Kent watches him stop himself in real time.

He single-handedly defanged Augustin Berenger, which has got to be some form of animal abuse to the tune of a felony in at least a few states and provinces.

Inside of him there are two voices, an angel and a devil. The angel pets his hair and tells him that this is for the best, that not screwing up the team’s dynamic just as it’s hitting its stride and potentially throwing off the trajectory of their brewing Cup run by getting his rocks off with another teammate is the smart, unselfish move. Augustin has damage, huge jagged chips that will catch on the tender, barely-healed skin of his last mistake, and he’s doing the best for them both by staying away. She’s a sweet lady, his angel.

The devil grabs him by the neck of his shirt every time Augustin so much as looks at him with those massive brown eyes and shakes him until his teeth rattles in his head.

“Are you excited for the tournament?” Kent asks after he’s gotten dressed in real clothes, and they’re making their way back to the car. He wants things to go back to normal, and knows that they never, ever will. Their conversations are stilted and polite, at least by their metric. In a way, he’s already in mourning over what they used to have.

The devil’s playing his ribs like a xylophone.

Augustin squints at him, and when he tilts his head just so, Kent has to suck in a long, deep breath to tamp down the warmth bubbling up through his chest.

“I guess,” he says, accent curling over the words. “Although it’s going to be a bit of a fiasco for me.”

“Oh yeah, who’s your special guest?” Kent has the wherewithal to ask. Augustin sighs loudly.

“My sister.”

He walks away towards the garage, and Kent’s heart drops out of his ass.

Angelique Berenger, God’s gift to women’s hockey, flies into Vegas the night before the tournament. Augustin fusses over his outfit for twenty minutes in the mirror hung on the living room wall while he waits for a text alerting him to pick her up from the airport. His hair is carefully groomed and moussed, freshly trimmed, and he’s wearing the burgundy sweater from Jeff’s party again.

Kent’s making sure he’s not looking. His hands still remember the feeling of the fibers against his palms as they roved up Augustin’s solid back, which causes him to think about how Augustin was tall enough to make him tilt his head and arch his neck, which causes him to think about how he hasn’t gotten laid in seven years.

It’s a very slippery slope that he lives on.

“What’s the big deal?” he asks, studiously reading through the latest draft speculations as Augustin fusses with his cuffs. “Have you never met your sister before?”

“She’s gonna hate Vegas,” Augustin mutters, and Kent tries not to take offence to that, “She’s my dad’s kid through and through. Hates fucking spectacle. I tried to put her in one of the less gimmicky hotels, but every single fucking one is so shiny it hurts my eyes.” He turns to Kent, adjusting his watch, “Do I look-”

He cuts himself off, and turns stiffly back to the mirror, tugging at the sweater’s neckline. Kent realizes with a pang that he’s just trying to impress his big sister. It reminds him of Beth, who sends him her essays when she does particularly well even though he has no idea what she’s talking about, and asks if he likes them every time. Younger siblings, he supposes, will never know that their older siblings’ pride is unconditional.

“You look fine,” he says quietly. Augustin looks better than fine. He looks perfect. But Kent’s made the mistake of screwing a teammate before and he’s not about to dive headfirst back into the very hole he just swam out of years after the fact. “Just…take her to dinner somewhere lowkey, and tomorrow, we can just focus on hockey.”

He can see Augustin nodding in the mirror. “Right. Yeah. Just hockey.”

He still looks nervous, so Kent throws him a bone, “There’s a good Japanese place a few streets away. No loud music, no fire, great ramen. I’ll send you the address.”

Augustin nods again, twisting his watch around and around, “Alright. Thanks.”

He leaves about ten minutes later, and Kent is alone with just his cat on a Friday night during the prime of his life. If only his sixteen year old self could see him now.

He thinks about calling Beth, just to check in, but she’ll call him on Sunday after her intramural volleyball game, and they’ll see each other in Newark in February. Besides, he doesn’t want her to interrogate him about Augustin. Based on the texts he’s been receiving from her, their mom spilled the beans almost immediately.

She had texted him from the cab in New York: He’s a good, thoughtful young man. You certainly know how to pick them.

It was decidedly suboptimal that Kent had been three feet from Augustin when he got his mother’s seal of approval to date the man he rejected a week earlier.

He very briefly toys with the idea of calling Jack, but self-righteous smugness is about as easy to stomach as a nosy sister right about now. He hates that Jack was right about so much, and yet not about the thing he wants the most. And what’s worse, he can’t even blame Jack for this. It’s not his fault that Kent’s fucked in the head from a hookup seven years in the past. If Jack can overdose, recover, go to college, come out, and get engaged in that span of time, Kent can figure out how to date someone.

But not a teammate, the angel chides.

“Oh my God, shut the fuck up,” he says out loud. Kit stirs in his lap, mews at him crankily, and lays her head back down. Kent sighs, and falls asleep where he sits. It’s not as if he has anything better to do.

He wakes up at six in the morning to pre-dawn light coming in the windows, Kit curled up on the floor beside Augustin’s shut bedroom door, and a blanket draped over his body. He plucks at the edge of his mother’s handiwork, which he distinctly remembers as being folded on the other edge of the couch last night. The room smells very, very faintly of eucalyptus shampoo.

“Fuck,” he says quietly.

His neck is killing him, but he manages to get out of the house intact and in halfway decent clothing that wouldn’t kill a Victorian child on sight. Augustin is another story: he’s got a strange grimace on his face, and is hardlining his third cup of coffee this hour. He’s already not a morning person, but he hasn’t been sleeping well recently. Besides, there’s exhaustion and then there’s the repercussions of family dinner, even with the ones you love.

“Do we need to pick up your sister?” Kent asks as he starts the car.

“I got her a driver,” Augustin grunts, draining his travel mug, “I’m meeting her there. She fucking tore into me about it, but, um…we tend to disagree a lot. About money.”

Kent doesn’t say anything. It must be difficult for the two siblings to do the exact same thing, but one rakes in millions each year while the other picks up a second job because the first and most important one doesn’t pay her enough to live. He just keeps driving and lets the engine fill the silence.

“Hey, Parson?” Augustin says as they pull into the garage under the arena.

“Yeah?” Kent says, looking over at him. Augustin gives him what can only be called an expression of deep remorse.

“I, uh- if anything weird happens today, I’m sorry. In advance.”

“Uh,” Kent says, knuckles tightening over the steering wheel. “Okay?”

He’s on edge the whole time as they park, and his spine makes an effort to wriggle out of his body as he receives a pair of track pants and a plastic whistle from the event organizers, who look about as happy to wrangle a bunch of grown men as they are to later wrangle a bunch of little kids. He lurks with a cup of bad coffee a few yards away from the bend that conceals the dressing room, waiting for Augustin and his sister to come around the corner so he doesn’t get ambushed.

“Hey, man,” Jeff says, joining him with a yawn. “Watcha doing?”

“I’m the captain,” Kent says, taking a sip of coffee, “I’m greeting our guest.”

He looks over at Swoops, and is shocked to find that not only is he wearing a brand-new black Aces hoodie instead of his ratty, stained grey one, but his beard is freshly trimmed, and his hair is cut and gelled. He’s got his nice watch on, too, instead of the smartwatch with the cracked screen, and the retainer with his fake tooth is in.

“Uh,” Kent says, because Swoops didn’t even look this good for Scraps’ fucking wedding last summer, and he was the best man. “What are you doing?”

“I’m the alternate,” is the shifty reply, “Uh, and I organized this tournament, so if anyone should be greeting guests, it’s me.”

Kent rolls his eyes, pent up aggression flowing out like a stream, “Man, if you wanted to be a camp counselor so badly, you could’ve saved your parents a lot of money by quitting this whole professional sports thing earlier-”

“Oh-” Swoops grabs his arm, eyes widening, “There they are. Be cool.”

“I’m always cool.” A fist socks him on the shoulder and Kent snorts, “Man, you make it too easy.”

“Shut up, shut up,” Jeff hisses just as the Berenger siblings round the corner, heads leaned together.

Angelique Berenger is almost a carbon copy of her brother, other than the colour of her hair; it’s a tumble of honey-brown curls tied into a neat ponytail that swings against her back rather than a shorter, dark shock of waves. Her face is softer, but it’s the same regal aquiline nose and high cheekbones, thin clever mouth and large, deep brown eyes, and legs longer than should be considered justified.

She is, as red-blooded heterosexual men keep describing her-

“A fucking rocket.” Jeff sighs, so lovesick and disgustingly fond that Kent genuinely doesn’t know where to start with the chirps. There’s just so much material to work with.

It’s about while he’s making these observations when Angelique spots him from the end of the hall, and he experiences the horrifying ordeal of her knowing who he is. Based on the expression on her face and the double take she does when she spots him, not entirely kindly, either.

Her voice rings through the cavernous hallway, “You!”

“Uh oh,” Swoops says as Angelique bears down on them like a demon out of hell, “Hey, Angelique, are you still single?”

“Not fucking happening again, Troy. Go away, I have to beat up your captain.”

“Again?” Augustin shouts, his footsteps coming furiously down the hallway, “What does that fucking mean, again?”

Swoops shrugs like he’s given it the good ol’ college try, patting Kent on the back, “This one’s all you, buddy.”

“You fucked up my little brother,” Angelique accuses as Swoops makes a speedy exit. Kent can see Augustin scrambling after her from over her shoulder, and silently wishes he was as fast off the ice as he is on it. He’s frozen in place.

“Uh-”

“Angelique, s’il te plait, c’est gênant,” Augustin says in rapid fire French, “J’vais me tuer, je ne plaisante pas. Veux-t’avoir cela sur la conscience?”

Angelique whirls on her brother, giving Kent a moment to breathe, “Augustin Gérard Berenger, c’est n’est pas drôle. Ne me dis plus jamais ça, putain!”

“Angelique Catherine Berenger, je ne suis pas un petit bébé, tu ne peux pas me dorloter.” Augustin manages to worm his way between Kent and his sister, though Kent isn’t entirely confident he’s well-protected. Angelique’s almost as tall as Augustin, and she has reach. “Tu ne me vois pas pleurer sur le fait qu'il ne veut pas sortir avec moi. Je peux y faire face, pourquoi pas tu?”

“Alors, il est stupide,” Angelique mutters.

“Hey!” Kent says, because he’s pretty sure that they’ve been talking about him this whole time, and he’s still got some dignity left.

“Shut the fuck up,” both siblings retort at the same time.

Kent shuts the fuck up. There goes his dignity.

“Tu es un vrai pisseux,” Angelique tells her brother, crossing her arms. Augustin snorts, crossing his own arms in an echo of hers. His grin grows into that familiar shit-eating smirk.

“Je sais que tu l’es, mais qui suis-je? Parlons de ce “again,”” he shakes his head, “Jeffrey motherfucking Troy. Really, Angie?”

“You know what?” Angelique says, her accent far more pronounced than her brother’s. She speaks with the rapid precision of a machine gun, “I didn’t say anything about the fact that my little brother couché avec l'un de mes meilleurs amis à l'arrière d'une pécup, so I don’t think he gets to comment on anything I do with my private life.”

“Oh my God, get over that,” Augustin grumbles. “Jesus fuck, that was eight years ago.”

“And yet he still asks after you,” Angelique sniffs, brushing by them with a swish of her honey-brown hair. “Every time. Je demanderais ce que tu as fait avec lui, but frankly, I don’t want to know.”

“Who does?” Kent hears himself say loudly. Augustin turns to stare at him as Angelique disappears down the tunnel.

“Just some guy,” he says without inflection. Kent nods, trying not to get up in arms about this guy that Augustin won’t talk about. He has his life, and Kent’s the one who said he couldn’t do anything more. He has no right to be pissed off, or jealous, or whatever the worming sourness crawling under his skin right now is.

His voice is still slightly bitter when he says, “So, you told her about…”

“No,” Augustin says shortly, “No, I told her I had a…thing, and she, uh…she managed to guess.”

“She guessed.”

“Yeah, Kent,” Augustin’s voice is rigid, “Surprise! She knows me pretty well. It’s almost like she’s known me for twenty-five fucking years. God, sometimes you are so fucking simple-”

“Hey, fucking forgive me if I thought that your bony, repressed ass was actually capable of keeping something to your fucking self-”

“Oh, hey, you’re both at it again. Nature is healing,” Cross interrupts, sticking his head out into the hallway. “Are you guys coming, or should I let you fight some more before the kids get here?”

“We’re fucking coming,” Kent snaps at him. Cross just grins, his bearded face unmoved. Lena vocally hates the new beard, and Kent thinks he’s going to shave it off during the next roadie as a gift to her.

“That’s a hundred and twenty bucks for the jar, Parser.”

Kent turns back to Augustin, who just has a smug little look on his face, “Feel better?”

“Little bit,” Kent replies. It does feel better, like stretching a muscle after it’s been unused for a while. “Can you spot me some cash?”

“Fat fucking chance.” Augustin replies as they walk down the hall together.

In the dressing room, everyone is looking at Angelique a little too adoringly for what Kent is sure their girlfriends would appreciate if they were here. They’re all sitting up way straighter than normal. Augustin definitely notices, since he’s glaring at as many people as he can at once. Most of the time, though, he’s glaring at Jeff.

“Is this what it’s like to be you?” Swoops whispers as Kent takes a seat next to him, “I can feel my skin peeling off my bones, dude.”

“You’re the one who slept with his sister,” Kent replies lowly, tucking a few bills into the slowly filling jar. “Literal fucking cliche. There’s nothing I could possibly do or say that’s worse than that.”

There definitely is, and Kent’s definitely done it, but Jeff’s too busy trying to decide whether to wilt or posture to tell that from his expression.

Someone comes in and gives them a weary spiel on how not to interact with children, making sure to glare extra hard at the trifecta of tomfoolery that is Devon Smith, Luka Rubenis, and Daniel McCandles, who have all been separated from each other for the greater good of the youth but who Kent is sure will somehow find a way to circumvent this.

“Any questions?”

Smitty raises his hand. Kent shakes his head, “Nope, Smitty, don’t even think about it.”

“Killjoy,” Smitty mutters as he puts his head down, Ruben clearly crestfallen beside him.

The rest of the Aces schlepp off, some to wait for their own turns on the ice, and some to the Aces practice rink where the rest of the tournament is being held. Kent laces up his skates, pretending not to eavesdrop on the conversation Augustin and Angelique are having in whispered French as they tug on the laces.

“Tu ne sais pas ce que c'est, Angie. S'il te plaît, essaie de t'en sortir.”

Angelique’s voice is dismissive, “J'essaierai. Crisse, la façon dont il te regarde... je l'aurais déjà frappé avec une batte de baseball.” She reaches out and slaps Augustin on the leg, “Grouille-toé!”

She gets up, dodging Augustin’s attempted blow in return, and follows Jeff out of the dressing room. Augustin shouts after her, “If I see you two sucking face on the ice, I’ll fucking tell Mom you’re dating, I’m not kidding!”

“Uh, what?” Swoops says from down the hall.

“Don’t worry about it,” Angelique replies quickly.

Augustin gives his skate laces a final yank and mutters, “Maybe I’ll sleep with one of his sisters. Asshole.”

“Brothers,” Kent says offhandedly, grabbing his gloves. “Jeff only has brothers.”

“Even better,” Augustin grins viciously up at him. Kent’s devil is throwing a hissy fit inside his head as they make their way onto the ice.

“How many kids are there?” Augustin asks as they set up the ice and listen to the shrieks and giggles of children getting dressed in the zamboni tunnel. With the echoes, it could be ten, or it could be a hundred.

“Thirty, or something.” Swoops says, tossing a puck up from his stick and twirling it like he’s a colour guard before the puck can land squarely back on the blade. “Are you good with kids, Gus? I forgot to ask.”

Based on the loud, snorting laugh that Angelique lets out and the way that Augustin drops his stick with a clatter to chase her around the rink, two blurs of black and grey throwing up arcs of white, Kent can take a guess as to what the answer is.

The tournament for the U7s has no stakes whatsoever, which is why Kent loves it. They don’t even play three full periods; it’s two ten minute halves with running time and they don’t keep an official score. The kids just tumble onto the ice in a horde and rampage around for an hour. It’s great.

To get the kids in the mood, and to run down some of their allotted hour of ice time, he spends a chunk of time towing around seven or eight kids on his stick, where they cling like grapes to a stem as he skates around. Nearby, Swoops is using his stick to spin a bunch of starfished kids in a circle by their skates, like he’s a witch stirring a cauldron. Augustin’s currently being followed by a pack of goalies, their little pads squeaking as they trail him and attempt to jump on the puck he’s stickhandling.

When they all get bored of that, and the adults need a minute to catch their breath, Kent elects to warm them up with a game.

“First one to tag Coach Gus wins a hundred bucks!”

On cue, Augustin immediately peels off down the ice at speed, trailed by about thirty shrieking, giggling five year olds coming at him in every direction like multicoloured dodgeballs. After about a minute, he dives dramatically onto the ice and slides on his back towards one of the shier kids, a little girl with a pink helmet and purple jersey huddled near the boards.

“Salut,” he says up at her, coming to a stop by her skates and Kent can hear the smile in his voice when the girl politely taps him on the visor with a glove. He scrambles up, back covered in white snow, “We have a winner!”

The kids cheer as Augustin tows the little girl around on a victory lap before wrangling the kids towards their water bottles, cameras flashing in the stands as their parents take a thousand pictures that will show up in wedding slideshows and blackmail reels. Augustin kneels, putting his glove under his knee to cushion it, and helps the shy girl unlatch her cage to fix the hair falling into her eyes.

He didn’t think Augustin would be good with kids, but here he is being proven wrong. That’s the most genuine smile he’s ever seen. The girl throws her arms around Augustin’s neck, and he laughs, a dimple appearing in his left cheek as he gives her a gentle pat on the back.

“Hm!”

Kent looks over to see Angelique looking at him with narrow eyes and a smug face, and narrows his own eyes back, “What?”

“Nothing,” she says cryptically, and skates away to lead a few more substantive passing drills.

Eventually, they separate the kids by colours and explain the most basic of rules: where to shoot, how faceoffs work, which Kent and Swoops demonstrate spiritedly, and what a whistle means.

“Any questions?” Augustin asks once they’re done. There’s a general commotion as all the kids separate into their teams, except for a few stragglers in the middle.

“Um,” one of the kids says loudly, “Did you know my sister is fifteen?”

“Yeah?” Augustin asks patiently, leaning down to brace his stick against his knees. The kid toddles over and tugs on the collar of Augustin’s track jacket so that his ear gets lower to the kid’s cage. “That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah, and she says that you’re so hot, and then she said uh…she got mad at me? Because I said it was scary that you were so tall! Like Gumby. Do you know Gumby? You kinda look like him.”

Augustin’s face is bright pink. Swoops starts laughing so hard that he has to take a knee on the ice, wheezing as a bunch of kids swarm him to ask him why he’s laughing and clamber all over him like he’s a jungle gym. Kent grins himself, pressing his fingers flat against his tongue and giving his best taxicab whistle.

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road!”

The U7s play cross-ice, which means Kent does less coaching and more making sure that the three simultaneous games don’t have any stray pucks bouncing over the black pads they’ve used to divide the rink into thirds. Angelique and Augustin clearly have some sort of bet going on their teams, because they’re both encouraging their players to not only score, but to strategically fall into the path of their opponents.

“That’s a penalty,” he remarks to Augustin as the first period ends. “Diving, tripping, et. cetera.”

“They’re fucking six, they’re not gonna remember this tomorrow,” Augustin retorts, already putting a fifty into Swoops’ open palm. “Alright, bibittes! Back at it!”

By the end, the kids have to be torn off the ice like they’re Velcroed to it, and Kent is almost as tired as a full game usually makes him. They end up chasing down and rounding up about twenty kids with the nets, each one chock full of giggling kindergarteners who wobble off the ice with signed sticks and jerseys. Kent spots a hundred dollar bill sticking out of the shy girl’s glove as she waddles away, and shakes his head with a smile.

“Where’s your stick?” Swoops asks him. He looks around and spots a little boy booking it away from his parents with Kent’s comically long stick clutched against his chest. He waves off their apologetic looks and cups his hands around his mouth.

“He can keep it!”

Not to be shown up, he sees Augustin hands his own stick to one of the little girls still trying to go for another lap as a bribe to get her off the ice.

The U7 games wrap up pretty quickly, but they all stick around for the next, real game slated on the Aces home rink, the U13 girls team from Toronto that Angelique is set to coach against Scraps’ U13 team from Chicago. He and Augustin drop in on the dressing rooms to say hello, and Kent tries not to be offended when Scraps’ team spends more time pestering Augustin than him.

“It’s nice to see, isn’t it?” he says to Augustin as they stand in the zamboni tunnel watching Angelique’s team warm up. The girls on the ice are clearly struggling not to freak out over Angelique as she draws out their warm up on a whiteboard. They’re bouncy. Kent’s almost forgotten what it’s like to feel like that.

Augustin’s got an inordinately fond look on his typically flat face, that turns into an affronted one when it becomes clear that Angelique is instructing her players to shoot directly at their faces behind the glass as target practice.

“It was nice,” he agrees begrudgingly when the first puck bounces off where his nose is. “She doesn’t really have time to do this, much.” He turns to Kent, “Hey, I’m gonna stick around until game time tonight. You don’t need to stay.”

“I got nothing else to do,” Kent replies. “Besides, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Love of the game, and all that?”

Augustin looks down at him, expression unreadable, before he finally says, “Are you done PMSing? Or should I get you some tissues?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Tampon?” Augustin continues doggedly, following Kent into the stands and hitching his legs up onto the edge of the boards when they sit down, “Chocolate?”

Kent flips his baseball cap around and shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets. “I’m going to tell your sister you said that, you sexist fuck.”

They end up watching the whole game. One of the girls on Angelique’s team can really fucking fly, and Kent makes a point of telling her that as she comes off the ice with flushed cheeks. She beams at him, so wide and toothy as he signs her jersey next to Angelique’s signature: to the best #7

“Ouch,” Augustin says, but he signs underneath it as well. The girl giggles as she joins her teammates, who immediately fawn over her jersey and start showing off their own signed sticks and gloves and in one case, an elbow pad.

“Okay,” Angelique sighs as she comes over, pulling her long hair out of its high bun so that it falls in tangled waves over her shoulders. “What a fucking time, eh? How’s Scarpello doing?”

“Nursing his wounds,” Kent replies. “Your team thrashed his. He’s gonna get chirped to oblivion.”

Angelique grins, shedding her track jacket and tying it around her waist. “And I am sure he will accept it with dignity and grace.”

“Oop, U15 boys,” Augustin says distastefully, and for good reason, because the boys seem to smell them from the opposite side of the rink, and start throwing their bodies at the boards in front of Kent and Augustin until Cross hollers them back in line for their warm ups.

There’s one girl in the mix, distinguishable by her jet-black braid and the way that the boys skirt around her during warm-ups, shoving each other into the boards instead. A couple of them reach out to tug her braid or swat her legs with their sticks when they pass her by, but she always seems just a little separate from the rest of them.

“Ah, I don’t miss that,” Angelique says quietly, watching the girl skate around as the timer ticks down and parents filter into the stands, “They’re from Ottawa, right? Is their coach here? I should talk to him about getting her into a girl’s development program.”

“Why?” Kent asks, despite the murder eyes Augustin is giving him that are drilling into his forehead, “This team is good. If she stays on it, she’ll get a great chance at an NCAA scholarship.”

“You have a very optimistic view of the world, Kent,” Angelique says, which is something nobody has ever said to Kent before in his goddamn life. She walks away with her stick over her shoulder, and he can’t help but feel like his foot’s getting a little too easy to fit into his mouth.

“What did I say?”

Augustin grimaces, turning back to watch the teams line up for puck drop. “She used to play boys in minor hockey. Same team as me, actually, but the age bracket above. She was keeping up, but she was a defenceman, and the coaches were worried she would get injured if she kept going. They transferred her to a girls development program at fifteen,” he says quietly, “Took her to Montreal. It was the right decision in the end.”

“But they kicked her out,” Kent can surmise pretty easily. “She didn’t choose to leave.”

Augustin turns to him with a hollow look, “She’s trying to do her best, is all.”

“Yeah,” Kent says quietly, burrowing deeper into the plastic seat, “Right.”

It’s a little after one in the afternoon by the time the U15 game ends. Kent could probably eat a horse at this rate, so he and Augustin slink up to the lunchroom and shovel down chicken and pasta while the Zamboni gets the ice ready for the U17 team. Half the Aces are in various states of disrepair. Harley’s laying facedown on the couch.

“I am never having kids,” he says, his thick Norwegian accent obscuring more of the syllables than the cushions do. “Never, ever, ever.”

“That bad?” Kent asks, giving him a pat between the shoulder blades as he goes to grab a Gatorade from the fridge. Harley lifts his beleaguered head and squints up at him.

“I tell my girlfriend, when we are having kids, we will send go to boarding school at 13. No teenagers. They are very stupid.”

“It’s not like hockey players get much better with age,” Augustin says, and even though it’s not a jab in any particular direction, it lands like one.

“Where’s your sister, Gus?” Scraps asks through a mouthful of pasta.

“She’s getting some work done in the conference room,” Augustin replies, poking at the mound of pasta on his plate as Kent sits next to him. Their knees are an inch apart under the table, and it shouldn’t matter since Kent’s knees are actually hitting Petal’s knobby ones every three seconds. He can feel the warmth leeching off of Augustin’s skin.

“That blows,” Linsky says, obnoxiously chomping an apple, “Is she single?”

“You’re way too young for her,” Augustin says at the same time Kent says, “Swoops already beat you to it.”

Swoops chooses the perfect moment to walk in, “Beat you to what? What did I do?”

Kent gets lunch with a show as about twenty grown men rip into their alternate captain for his poor choice in phrasing and even poorer choice in hookup partners for the better part of an hour.

They miss the U17 game, but it’s probably for the best. Kent doesn’t really have it in him to watch a bunch of sixteen-year-olds zipping around and reminding him of things he ought to forget. Augustin decides he really ought to spend some time with his sister before she leaves, so Kent moseys back out for the last remaining game, the U9s, and somehow gets sucked into helping Ruben and Linsky coach.

It’s not often he gets to be on the ice alone, so he stays back while Ruben and Linsky slink off to take a nap before their game in a few hours. It’s dead quiet in the massive stadium, and they have the lights at half-brightness to conserve energy. He takes aimless shots at the nets, circling around the center dot lazily. Every time he looks up, he can see the asymmetry of the banners in the rafters. Another Cup banner would complete the row.

He wants to kiss that silver more than he wants to keep breathing.

When he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine that he’s flying. The wind whistles through his hair, the cold air trickling down his neck and spine. He takes shots with muscle memory alone, lazy shots that hit netting with a satisfying swish without him looking. Pull back, release, pull back, release, until the small pile of pucks is nothing but air.

When he opens his eyes again, the ice-cleaning crew is staring at him from the Zamboni tunnel. Augustin is standing next to them, hair clipped back and hands stuck in his pockets. Kent drops his bottom hand off his stick and the clack of it hitting the ice echoes through the empty stadium.

“Wanna play?” He shouts through the glass.

“We have a game in three hours!” Augustin shouts back, “The Zambonis need to go on!”

The ice crew boos him, one of them even throwing a snowball that explodes at Augustin’s feet. Kent grins. He can see Augustin roll his eyes from here.

“Let me get my skates.”

He leaves, and comes back five minutes later with a motley crew in tow: Scraps and Linsky carrying player sticks, Smitty, Flicker, Swoops, Allie, Frisk, and Angelique. The ice crew funnels into the stands, chattering happily as two of them haul the Zamboni doors open.

“Did you ask everyone in the locker room to play?” Kent chirps as the Aces approach. Augustin gives him a withering look as he steps out onto the ice with a crisp scrape of metal.

“What was I supposed to say? No? Don’t come? I don’t like you?”

“Wouldn’t want to force you to lie about liking us. Five on five?” Kent offers as they step out, tossing his stick onto center ice. The rest of them drop their sticks on the pile with a clatter, and Angelique, deemed the least biased out of them all, separates them into two sides. Kent ends up on a team with Smitty, Frisk, Swoops, and Scraps.

“I think we’re fucked,” Swoops says as the siblings gather Flicker, Allie, and Linsky into a tight circle. Kent looks over at the shared intensity on the faces of the two siblings, and silently concurs.

“Nah,” Smitty says, because he’s nineteen, “We got this.”

The rules are shinny rules: “no lifting the puck for passes, no slapshots, no contact. Post is one point, crossbar is two. Parse, if I see you try and cheat by not crossing the red line after a point, I’ll chop your legs like a goddamn cherry tree.”

“Who died and made you George motherfucking Washington?”

“Thank God they’re not on the same team,” Frisk sighs to Allie as he ushers Kent away from the wing and towards the face-off dot. Angelique skates up to take the face-off for her team.

“I thought you were a defenseman,” Kent asks, bracing his stick against his knees. Angelique smiles hungrily at him, a familiar smile with all teeth that makes his heart skip a beat. Her hair is bundled atop her head in a tight bun, and when she tilts her head slightly to the left, Kent’s left to wonder if maybe he’s attracted to women after all.

“I didn’t know I’d be making a team with only two forwards,” she shrugs, putting her stick on the ice. “We’re, euh…making do.”

He wins the face-off, but it doesn’t even matter since Angelique intercepts a messy pass from Scraps about ten seconds later and pegs the center of the crossbar on her first shot with a loud, bell-like ring. Kent sees the shot happen in slow motion: pull, snap, release. It’s a familiar technique, and it works just as well when it’s employed by her. Maybe even better.

“Oh, fuck,” Smitty says as he gathers the puck, Augustin and Angelique retreating behind the red line. “We’re so fucked.”

Playing Angelique is a nightmare in itself. Kent’s never appreciated how different the womens’ game really is. They can’t hit to check, so whenever he tries to deke around Angelique in the neutral zone, she’s on him every time, her stick tangling his up and knocking the puck to her waiting brother. No tricks get past her, only his speed a couple of times when he catches her on the pivot from forward to backwards.

Playing her and Augustin is as brutal as it is stunning. Kent almost overexerts himself trying to keep up with them, as they skate circles around everyone else. It’s not just Augustin’s innate speed, and the fact that Angelique doesn’t have a game in a few hours to save her energy for: it’s that they know each other better than Kent’s ever seen players know each other before.

The ice crew cheers them on, and Kent can hear himself laughing as he dodges Linsky’s clumsy swipe and pings one off the crossbar. Augustin scoops it up before Kent can hustle behind the red line, and they have a little one-on-one as he angles Augustin towards the boards.

“Nice try,” he says as they reach the top of the circles, and Augustin grins at him. It’s all teeth, but there’s no viciousness in it. Just sheer, childlike delight.

“You’d think so,” he calls back, and puts the brakes on with a spray of snow. Kent shoots right past him, and by the time he loops around, Augustin’s sent one off the top left corner where the crossbar meets the post. The sound of his whoop trails across the ice as he glides away, hands thrown jovially in the air.

That, right there. Kent’ll be eighty and decrepit, and he’ll still remember how Augustin looked just then, for a brief, beautiful moment in time that’s gone as quickly as it comes except for in his head. He’ll never get it back, but he’ll have it forever.

Something in his lungs, which has been bound up for so long that he forgot it could be released, breaks apart.

“Hey,” he says in the dressing room as they get ready for their actual game. Angelique will be in the Aces management box today, and all the minor hockey teams will be scattered around the stadium. He can still feel the energy pulsing through his limbs.

“Yeah?” Augustin says, looking over at him, half-dressed with a black dry-fit shirt on and eyeliner stark against his pale skin. He straightens up when Kent doesn’t say anything.

And Kent can’t remember who’s winning their bet.

“We’re about to play the Jets,” Augustin says when he doesn’t say anything, “Please don’t get fucking weird when my sister is here. If we lose to Winnipeg, I’m going to smother you in your sleep, I’m not kidding. It’s Winnipeg, and I know that means nothing to your American ass, but-”

“Gus.”

”What?”

Kent grins, “Let’s play some fucking hockey.”

Augustin blinks at him, and a slow smile breaks over his face. A real smile, with the dimple in the left cheek. “Okay.”

“Did you hear that, boys? Let’s play some fucking hockey!”

The game passes in a blur of passes, shots, and the velvety passage of time that skates over Kent’s skin along with cold air and sweat. He commits the vaguest, most minute details to memory: the crest of snow from a stop, the sound of pucks hitting Scraps’ pads, the huff of breath as he gets checked along the boards.

He scores twice, and Augustin gets both primary assists, and he can’t remember who’s winning the bet, but he does remember the feeling of Augustin’s arm around his neck and the sound of cheering.

They win 3-2, and both the angel and the devil are silent. It’s just Kent in his own head, and the Jets slumping off the ice in defeat, and Kent wants to call after them, but didn’t you have fun?

He doesn’t, because he doesn’t have a death wish.

He lets Augustin drive Angelique back to her hotel and hitches a ride with Swoops, who doesn't say anything to him but has a weird, knowing look in his eyes. He’s only two years older than Kent, but he was traded here, not drafted, and even if he has a no-trade clause in his contract now, he still knows things that Kent doesn’t.

“Good game,” he says. Kent eyes him warily. The euphoria is starting to wear off now, and dread pools in his stomach like the lead lining of a nuclear reactor. That’s not Jeff’s good game tone. That’s his alternate captain voice.

“Yeah, it was great.”

“You found a new gear,” Jeff comments, turning onto his street, “You and Gus. Every time I think you guys can’t get better, you find a way.”

“Jeff, will you get to the fucking point, I’m only going to be this young and beautiful for so long.”

Swoops pulls into the visitor’s parking lot and kills the car’s engine, “Kent, is there something you want to tell me?”

He should say no, or laugh, or punch Jeff in the shoulder. Instead, he says, ”Want to?”

“Okay,” Swoops says patiently, twisting so his shoulder is braced against the back of the seat of his Range Rover. “Let me rephrase. You know you can tell me anything, right?”

Kent feels his head hit the back of the headrest, “God, Jeff, for fuck’s sake-”

“I’m just saying, man,” Swoops puts his hands up, “I’m just saying, I got your back. No matter what. Both of you.”

Here’s the thing: Swoops was there for Stanley-Cup-Makeout-Gate, or whatever the fuck Kent decides to call it now. He was the one who distracted Carl from saying stupid shit, and then drove Kent home after he had more vodka in his bloodstream than water by volume and couldn’t even stand upright, let alone walk to his car and get in. He half-carried Kent up to his apartment, and closed the door, and texted his then-girlfriend that he wouldn’t be home that night. She broke up with him the next day, which Kent only found out about last year.

At the time, Kent did not cry, and he did not rage, and he did not decompose into the earth. He just sat silently on his couch until the hangover came and the sun rose, and that’s how he knows that Jeff knows something.

“I know,” he says, and he doesn’t do Swoops the disservice of putting on a fake smile. “Thanks for the ride, man.”

If Jeff’s disappointed, he doesn’t show it. “Anytime.”

Kent’s getting ready for bed when Augustin comes in around midnight and drops the keys in the dish. It’s a familiar sound with a Pavlovian hold on him. He lopes back out into the living room to find Augustin rubbing his eyes in the foyer.

“Long night?”

“I gotta get up at six,” Augustin mutters, “To take her to the airport.”

“She’s flying out that soon?”

“She’s got her own game tomorrow night,” Augustin’s under-eyes are almost slate-grey. Sometimes, Kent wakes up to piss and can hear him pacing up and down at all hours of the morning. It’s not like before they left for the break; Augustin hasn’t been out since New Years. No Tuesdays, no Saturdays. It means something, but Kent’s not sure what, and he doesn’t want to guess in case he’s wrong.

“Right,” he says, “Night, then.”

He wakes up before sunrise to a muffled phone alarm in the other room that rings and rings and rings. It goes for three minutes before he drags himself out of bed and into Augustin’s room.

The room is still as pristine as always, but the carry-on is gone somewhere, and there’s a few books stacked on the desk. Kent almost stubs his toe on the bedframe as he stumbles over to the sleeping lump curled under the covers and shuts off the alarm. The whole room smells of eucalyptus and basil.

Augustin’s face is always tense with something: annoyance, cunning, condescension, smugness. When he’s asleep, it’s utterly lax, so peaceful that Kent feels lulled by it. The sudden lack of sound causes him to tuck his nose into the white comforter, until only his eyelashes and waves of dark hair are visible.

It’s cruel of him, but Kent places a gentle hand on where he thinks a shoulder is, and shakes.

“Gus.”

“Mmrf,” the lump that was second star of the game and leading Aces points-earner Augustin Berenger about eight hours ago mumbles. Kent feels his heart clench.

“Augustin,” he says, and shakes him again.

“Mmf,” the lump says, barely stirring, “Je…j’dois-aller…chercher m’sœur. Donnez-moi five minutes.”

“Jesus, Gus, when did you go to sleep?”

The lump doesn’t move, “Euh…four thirty. S’fine. I just need…five more minutes.”

“Yeah, you can’t drive like this,” Kent sighs, sitting on the edge of the bed. His hand is still resting on the crown of Augustin’s head, and he only lets his fingers gently weave through the curls because Augustin’s not coherent enough to remember this. “I’ll go drop your sister off. You gotta sleep.”

“No, five minutes,” Augustin mutters, but makes no move to sit up.

“Gus,” Kent repears, “Stay in bed. You look like shit.”

“Fuck you,” Augustin yawns, burrowing deeper into the pillows. “Where are the keys?”

He falls back asleep about ten seconds later.

Angelique’s waiting on the curb of the hotel when Kent drops by, and storms towards the car door before he can roll down his tinted windows.

“Merde, il était temps, je t'ai envoyé des textos- oh.”

“Hey,” he says, for lack of a better greeting. She blinks at him.

“You’re not my brother.”

“I’m letting him sleep.” Kent replies, scratching the back of his head awkwardly, “He, uh…hasn’t been sleeping well lately. I didn’t think it would be safe for him to drive. Do you need help with your bag?”

“No,” Angelique replies, “I pack light.”

It’s a fifteen minute drive from the hotel to McCarran, and they spend the first few minutes of it in awkward silence. Kent’s suddenly very aware of the threats made to him yesterday morning, and focuses on the road ahead of them, the flashing lights of the Strip that Angelique frowns distastefully at.

“You played a good game last night,” she says, breaking the heavy silence. “You pass more now than you used to do.”

“Augustin’s very demanding,” Kent replies, trying to find the right balance of charisma and feeling himself fail miserably. She shoots him a withering glare.

“He has more assists than you,” she says with a sniff, “He told me about your bet at dinner on Friday. First to seventy points? Calisse, I’ve seen subtler foreplay in some pornos.”

Kent chokes on his spit. They’re not even a third of the way to McCarran yet, and Angelique already has him by the throat. “What?”

“Oh please, spare me the innocent act,” she snorts, “I know what the fucking moves are. I’ve been playing longer than you’ve been alive, and there’s at least two gay couples on my team at any given point in time. I fucking know foreplay when I see it.”

“That’s not- I wasn’t- uh…”

“Augustin is a grown man, and I’m not a fucking nun,” she says waspishly, “It’s the deep-seated Catholic sensibilities, I fear. He likes to dance around it all, like he didn’t sleep with my old d-partner the second he turned eighteen-”

“What?”

“-and he says to me, ‘oh, Angie’—I’m paraphrasing, by the way— ‘we are just teammates, we are better as friends.’ Ugh,” she turns to him, and he’s pretty sure that if she could strangle him without crashing the car, she would. “He’s right, he’s not a baby and he doesn’t need to be coddled.”

He feels lightheaded. “What are you getting at?”

“Esti d'épais à marde! Do you like my brother, Kent Parson? Or did your mother drop you on your fucking head when you were a baby?”

He keeps his eyes on the road. Breathe in, breathe out. She may know her brother well, but she doesn’t know him. There’s nothing for her to guess. He could lie, and she would believe him, and then maybe things would go back to the way that they were.

And yet…

“Yeah,” he says quietly, “I do, I…I like him a lot.”

More than he can say, more than he probably ever will say.

Angelique doesn’t speak for about a minute. They pass two exit signs before she opens her mouth again, “August is stupid. He is smart in how people function, how they play, but he is very, very stupid when it comes to how people feel.” Kent can feel her eyes on him, boring into his skull, “Don’t be as stupid as my brother. I have no choice but to love him regardless of his shortcomings. You, on the other hand…” She shakes her head and sighs, “Men’s hockey is so fucking stupid sometimes. It would be so much better if you all dated like we do.”

That makes him crack up in spite of himself, “Are you serious?”

“Why do you think the Olympics are so good every time?” She retorts, “I am serious. It is, euh, what’s the phrase…narratively compelling. Makes for good hockey.”

“Until it gets fucked up,” Kent sighs, and the mood goes dark like a light switch flipping off. Angelique scoffs, leaning back against her seat.

“Let me tell you something, Parson,” she says, raising an angular brow at him, “You love hockey, and you play it well, but you take it for granted. Any hockey that you get to play in your life is good hockey, no matter how bad it seems at the time, to you or to anyone else. You’re lucky you won’t have to realize that until you retire.”

Kent turns into the Departures drop-off line and says, “Are you twenty-eight, or eight thousand years old?”

“It varies from moment to moment,” Angelique grins as he pulls to a stop in front of the door. He gets out of the car to help her lift the luggage out of the trunk, and she laughs at him when he struggles with the handle.

“Kent,” she says once he’s set the carry-on down on the pavement, “Can I be frank for a moment?”

“What you said in the car wasn’t frank?” He asks, crossing his arms over his t-shirt. In his haste to leave on time, he forgot a sweater, and gooseflesh is popping over his arms as he shivers in the desert wind. It has nothing to do with the way she’s arching her eyebrows and the uncanny resemblance, “Sure, go nuts.”

“If you’re worried, for some reason, that my brother might…leave, or break, or whatever it is that is keeping you from him,” Angelique says quietly, “You should know that…I have never seen him as happy on the ice as the Aces have made him. If you like him, or you don’t, or you can’t decide, whatever you do in the end will not break him. But losing this game…” she shakes her head, aiming a bitter glare at the ground, “You don’t know what happened-"

“I know,” Kent says hoarsely before she can continue, clearing his throat, “What happened with the Aeros.”

That makes her head shoot up, lips parting, “Merde. He told you?”

“No, I heard from…someone else. He doesn’t know that I know. You can’t tell him.”

Angelique looks at him for so long that some people start honking at them, mostly taxis struggling to find a place to park. They both ignore the noise. Finally, she sighs through her nose, lips compressing.

“He wouldn’t want you to know. It took him three years to tell me.”

“Which is why I had to find out. I’m his captain.” I’m his friend.

Angelique looks as if she’s struggling not to scream, her face bleak, “Then you know that the love for this game that he has slowly rebuilt, he will not survive losing it again. You must promise that whatever happens, whatever you do, you will not let it change how you play. Can you promise that?”

“Yes,” he says before he can logically dissect the ramifications. “I promise.”

“Good,” She leans up and pecks him once on each cheek before strolling into McCarran without a backwards glance. Kent watches, punch-drunk and half-delirious, as her tall, solid frame disappears into the throngs of people in the terminal. He wonders if he imagined this all.

A taxi honks, “Hey asshole! This isn’t a fucking rom-com! Move your damn car!”

For the longest time, he thought he loved Jack, and he swears he did, because Jack made his blood run and his breath shake, and he made Kent so much better at the same time that he made Kent so much worse. But it’s a capricious business, and their time together was always going to be fleeting. Kent knows that. His time with Augustin is fleeting too: trade or no trade, their game is not immortal, and one day it will end. The smart move is to play it as good as it is, not to gamble everything on the chance that it might get better.

And yet…

He walks into the apartment as the sun is rising, and Augustin’s bedroom door is ajar. His view is much better than Kent’s, because Beth used to have a thing for watching sunrises, and Kent lingers in the doorway watching the sun overtake the horizon through the gauzy blinds, golden light sliding slowly over Augustin’s sleeping form.

Kit slides around his ankles and scampers across the floor, leaping up to walk over Augustin’s body and curl on the unused half of the bed.

“Ugh,” the pile of blankets stirs, “Cat, I am not a climbing wall. Parson, stop fucking staring at me. Either come in or close the fucking door.”

Augustin’s bed is a king, so Kent can slide on top of the comforter on the far side and lift Kit into his lap without touching the mountain of sleep deprivation on the other side of the bed. He very carefully does not think about how Augustin sleeps on the left just like he plays, and that Kent would be on the right if he wasn’t a center.

But he is, and they’re not just talking about hockey.

“Did my sister get into the airport okay?”

“You remember that?” Kent asks, scratching under Kit’s chin. Augustin snorts, rolling over to look at him through sticky, half-opened eyes.

“People tend to remember when they get told they look like shit,” the last words end in a yawn, and then Augustin lifts the covers, heat radiating from underneath the cotton duvet. “You’re fucking shivering, and it’s driving me nuts. Get under the covers or stop it.”

It’s against his better judgement, but the conversation with Angelique and the smell of eucalyptus and jasmine must be making him insane. He slides under the comforter until it’s up to his chin, and even though there’s a foot of bed between their bodies, he can feel the warmth radiating off of Augustin’s skin.

“Hey, Augustin?”

The response is crotchety, “Yeah?”

“No homo?” he whispers, and the pillow that hits him on the side of the head is almost worth it.

He sits and watches the sun rise higher and higher, until Augustin yawns and pulls himself out of bed, hair wild around his face as he slumps into the adjoining bathroom and shuts the door. Kent listens to the water run, half his body exposed to cold air and the other half trapped in warmth.

Something’s gotta give, the devil says.

Not today, the angel whispers back.

After a minute, he stands, Kit curled in his arms, and goes to make coffee.

Notes:

my playoffs bracket is so fucked

this chapter is based on my experiences coaching kids hockey, which was the highlight of my life until their parents started getting crazy. i love filler!

also i just finished rereading beartown by frederik backman again and i think they should make it required reading for all boys over the age of 15 in hockey anywhere. please go read it if you haven't already. i have to go weep now. they will NEVER know how much i love you benji ovich

anyways: angelique berenger, love of my life, woman of my hockey, etc. women's hockey is everything to me and angelique is a physical representation of it. save me pwhl....pwhl save me...

Chapter 14

Summary:

In which Dustin Snow is a flirt, Augustin would rather be in South Korea, and the NHL All Star Game brings people together.

“Ugh,” Augustin mutters the second they get off the plane, putting his sunglasses on even though they’re in the middle of the airport terminal. The neon lights are ugly enough, “I fucking hate Florida.”

“Say that less loudly,” Kent whispers, probably because there’s some people looking at them with some very suspicious T-shirts on and he doesn’t feel like ending up in a Florida newspaper headline.

“Swampy pit of hell,” Augustin mumbles anyways, yanking his carry-on along the cracked linoleum. “We could be at the Olympics right now. Have you thought about that? I have. We could be in South Korea representing our countries right now, but that fuckwad Gary Bettman said no, you can’t go to Korea and play in the Olympics. You know who’s in Korea right now? My sister. She’s going to have three medals, Parson. Three!”

Kent tunes it out, just like he did for the whole flight, and the night before their flight, and all the days since Angelique came to Vegas. Once, he made the mistake of mentioning that the Olympics don’t start for another week and a half. That just set Augustin off on a longer tangent. She’s going to be insufferable after this, mark his words. He has to win a Cup in the next few years, or she’s going to cement herself as the favourite child forever by 2022.

“I’ve been to Tampa eighteen times, and I’ve never once been to South fucking Korea-”

Kent says, “Hey, I don’t know if you know this, but you’re loaded. You can just go to Korea.”

“It’s not the same-”

“Oy, Aces!”

They turn to see Cameron Brewster, the All-Star defenceman from the Schooners, coming up behind them. Kent grins and waves hello, elbowing Augustin to do the same.

“Ow,” Augustin says mildly as Brewski rolls up, all six-foot-six of him and his bright red hair. He does not wave. Brewski is a big Albertan guy who’s absolutely brutal on the ice and about as hockey-guy as it gets off of it. He’s wearing a suit because they have to in order to get paid properly, but there’s a backwards Schooners baseball cap on his head and he’s finishing off a can of Red Bull as he jogs up.

“Are you guys ready for the monkey suit parade?” He asks, tossing the empty can into a nearby garbage bin and looping a heavy arm around Augustin’s shoulders because he’s too tall to do it to Kent. Augustin bares his teeth.

“We were supposed to get in last night, but there was a storm,” Kent replies on his behalf, because if Augustin opens his mouth there’s a distinct chance that he’ll start biting indiscriminately, “I guess the same thing happened to you?”

“Yup,” Brewski says, yawning loudly, “Out of the frying pan, into the presser. But it’s cool. Skills Competition is always more fun than the fucking three-on-three bullshit. What are you guys doing?”

“Fastest skater, puck control,” Kent replies, “Gus is doing accuracy shooting and the fucking…what is it?”

“Passing challenge, whatever the fuck that means.” Augustin grunts as Kent spots the NHL liaisons waiting impatiently for them, “Let’s just get this over with.”

He storms off in the direction of the suits, but he still hears Brewski lean over to whisper, “Is he, like…okay? Like, I know he’s normally like that, but today he’s…more ‘like that’ than normal.”

“He doesn’t like media,” Kent whispers to reply, much louder, “Or spectacle. Or fun. He keeps calling this the clown show, and I can’t get him to stop. Also, he wants to be in PyeongChang right now.”

Brewski sucks his teeth, and puts sunglasses on as they exit into the Tampa sun, “Man, don’t we all?”

It’s Augustin’s fourth All-Star Game, and Kent’s sixth. It’s strange. Four All-Star games together and this is the first time they’re acknowledging each other with more than a nod hello and a few stilted, polite exchanges. Augustin typically does the bare minimum that the NHL requires of him since they discovered that leaving him alone at the autograph booth was much easier. Kent, on the other hand, typically has his hands full with so much media that his face is burned into television screens across America.

Now, they’re paired together for a slew of PR spots, almost inseparable since the league decided that their on-ice chemistry translated to marketable off-ice chemistry. They even assigned a tall, no-nonsense woman from the Marketing department to shadow Augustin like a guard dog and keep him from hiding in the equipment room like he did at his last All-Star Game.

“This is your fault,” he says lowly to Kent as they sit in the hot press tent waiting for their first interview. The PR lady is glaring daggers into his back, “Usually I’m in the arena by now. I had a system. I sign jerseys and photos, and then I hide in the locker room.”

“Do you want me to blow up a bus so you can run away?” Kent asks, checking his hair in his phone camera, “Shout “fire” and cause a stampede?”

“Would you?”

Kent shoots him a withering glare as their interviewer comes in, “No.”

“What the fuck else are friends supposed to be for?” Augustin hisses in his ear as she sits down. Kent pincers his face by the cheeks and forces him to turn and face her, patting him on the close side of his face once he begrudgingly complies. Augustin bats him off with a scowl.

“So basically I’m going to ask you some questions,” the girl says, her too-white teeth shiny and her ridiculous white-tasseled leather jacket tinkling in the breeze. He thinks her name is Bailey, or Kailey, or Hailey, or possibly Jemima, “And you can react however you want, I might ask some follow up questions and then we’re done! Sound okay?”

“What would happen if I said no?” Augustin asks, and Kent elbows him on the shoulder.

“Yeah, sounds good,” he says as Augustin rubs his upper arm, flashing her a wide grin with that signature Kent Parson All-American charm.

The interview is blissfully quick, and they’re soon shuffled off to the next one, where Kent says some stuff about community and charity, talks about the Ace of Spades tournament, and Augustin chimes in when he feels it’s necessary, foot bouncing against the edge of the tall chair. Kent’s always charismatic, but he could give the pundits on Sportsnet a run for their money at this rate. He’s got a bright future of pissing off younger players and older fans ahead of him.

“What about you?” The interviewer asks him directly. He’s a good-looking man a few years older than them, with a short dark beard, wire-framed glasses and a neat maroon button down. Augustin leans forward and smiles as best as he can.

“Well, I mean, I think hockey is the best sport in the world,” he says, shrugging genially, “But it’s expensive, and only really available to a certain group of people. I think it’s our job to change that.”

“That’s noble,” the interviewer says with a sunny smile, and he can’t help but smile in return. He’s become hyper-aware of when he’s being subtly flirted since his career started.

“I wouldn’t call it noble,” he says, “It’s just what we owe to our communities, and to ourselves.”

The rest of the interview is easier after that, since he doesn’t have to talk about himself. He, Kent, and the interviewer just shoot the shit about coaching kids hockey and playing shinny with hand-me-down skates.

“I didn’t talk too much, did I?” he asks the interviewer as they get ready to go. He gets a bemused face and crooked smile in return.

“Nah, you’re good,” he says, patting Augustin on the shoulder. His palm is warm, “I’m David, by the way. I forgot to introduce myself earlier."

“Gus, c’mon,” Kent says, his pleasant voice verging on annoyed, and Augustin shakes David’s hand quickly before the lurking PR lady can taze him or something.

The next few interviews come quick and fast, and they’re all stupid little games and trivia that allows his competitive streak to take over.

“Suck it!” he yells at Kent after he wins a beanbag toss, consumed by the fire of adrenaline, and the entire camera crew laughs when Kent nabs him by the neck and puts him in a headlock, “Ow, get off of me, you blond fucking ferret!”

His shadow ends up separating them, although even her stern mouth twitches, and she blissfully, finally, sends them away from the cameras.

“What the fuck was that?” Kent asks the second they’re released to the dressing rooms in the bowels of Amalie Arena. Augustin takes his sunglasses off as they duck inside the tunnel, and feels the bridge scrape across a brewing sunburn.

“What was what?”

“The-” Kent waves his hand up and down, “You hate doing media.”

“Yeah, I’m fucking aware, and you threw me under the bus.”

“But you were like,” Kent struggles for words, mouth opening and closing more than once, “...nice.”

“Nice,” Augustin echoes. Kent flushes.

“You fucking know what I mean. You were fucking…laughing, and all…smiley, and making fucking jokes with that interviewer, David? I didn’t even know you knew how to make jokes.”

Ah. “My agent told me that I had to be nice after the whole Kirby ordeal, and then the Islanders game,” Augustin mutters, flicking a lock of hair out of his eyes, “Like, charming and stuff. I was apparently becoming very unpopular in some circles.”

Unpopular is an overstatement. He’s generally well-liked because he does a lot of charity work in the offseason with Angelique, and people like sending clips of his responses to media around the internet. He just doesn’t cater to the older fans who think he’s soft and whiny, and so every six months Jerry has a little bitchfit about his target demographic.

And the Aeros faithful have never liked him, but there’s not much he can do about that.

Kent snorts at that, “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

He means it well, but Augustin can’t help but watch him interact with his peers and think no the fuck you don’t. Kent may be renowned as a flashy show-off with a massive ego, but he’s one of three or four people in the entire goddamn show whose ego is justified by his talent. Augustin may be one of the best players on any team he’s on, and consistently good enough to earn himself an Olympic gold medal and World Cup spot every year, but Kent makes the podium of the best players in the world, and every single room he walks into knows and respects him for it. He doesn’t have to try. He just is.

People can call Kent a rat or a priss all they want, and they do, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter. It all just burns away in the light.

Unlike Brewster, Augustin hates the Skills Competition. It’s a lot of waiting and watching, a lot of socialization caught on camera. He feels like an animal in a zoo, where a sticky-fingered snot is banging on the glass shouting at him to do something. Whenever Kent leaves his side to make his rounds to everyone like a good captain, he feels off-kilter, and struggles not to let it show on his face. He’s done this before, alone. He can do it again.

His neck feels bare without the neckguard, his hair loose around his face and itchy without his headband. The lights are so fucking bright, and without his eyeliner, they’re starting to hurt. He’s not really sure how real the pain is, but it’s real enough to bother him.

“Hey,” Snowy puffs when Augustin skates over to the bench and leans against the boards to watch the fastest skating competition. He’s decked out in the royal blue of Providence, complete with the obligatory snapback, “Good to see you, man. Do you also feel fucking naked without the helmet? I don’t know what it is, but I feel fucking unwieldy.”

“Dude, you are unwieldy. At least you won’t look like hockey Elvis tomorrow,” Augustin mutters. He’s glad they get to wear their team jerseys today. The all-white and neon orange Pacific Division uniforms they’ll have to wear for the three-on-three are so atrocious that he can’t stand to look at them. They make him look like he’s dying of consumption. “You mic’d up?”

“No,” Snowy says belligerently, “They never mic me, because there’s always too much shit to bleep out. I’m surprised you’re not though, since they’ve been putting you through the fucking PR ringer.”

“Parson’s mic’d,” Augustin tells him, craning his neck to jut his chin at where Kent is standing in serious conversation with the rest of the fastest skater competitors, plainly visible from his height and the black Aces jersey, “It’s just you, eh? I really thought Zimmermann or Mashkov would’ve been on the chopping block.”

“Ugh,” Snowy sighs dismally, “I swear, Zimmermann gets his dad to pull strings or something, because he never has to fucking go to these. He and his fiance are in Georgia right now planning his big fat fucking white wedding or something, so I’m in fucking Tampa. But like, could you imagine the fucking press if he was here? We’d have fucking…Buzzfeed crawling up our asses.”

“Is it morally bankrupt of me to wish that he was?” Augustin mutters, “Just so I wouldn’t have to do so many fucking videos where Parson and I are best friends forever and ever?”

“Aren’t you, though?” Snow grins, and Augustin smacks him on the head, gently. Can’t have any rumours starting to destroy his hard work today. “Anyways, I was talking to Price and we were saying that Zimmboni should have had his dad blackmail us into the Olympics, and then none of us would have to be here.”

“See?” Augustin jabs a finger into Snowy’s well-padded chest, “This is exactly what I’ve been saying, we should all be in Korea right fucking now. Get Bob Zimmermann on the phone."

“Well, technically it’s a couple of weeks from now-”

“What are you guys talking about?” Kent says, skating right into Augustin’s side to squish him against the boards. Augustin almost shoves him off with a few well-chosen words, but spots the camera lurking nearby and elects to scrub up Kent’s already wrecked hair even more.

“You guys are trending on Twitter,” Snowy says, “We were discussing how Augustin’s adjusting to your level of internet stardom.”

“I’m not really on social media,” Augustin says bluntly, which makes Kent snort.

“You’re so full of it, dude. You got in trouble for being on Instagram too much last week.”

There’s a video up on the Aces social media of Angelique giving an interview about women’s hockey at the Ace of Spades tournament. Augustin spent three afternoons ripping into assholes in the comments section before PR called him and threatened to shut down his accounts. He’s pretty sure the words “I fucking dare you” were said during that phone call, but he doesn’t remember exactly.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Jerry’s making him trot around the clown show like the prize donkey.

“I was on a mission to civilize,” he sniffs. “Anyways, glass houses. Your cat is more famous than the league.”

Kent grins, “Well, I’ll have you know that I have a sparkling internet personality, and I haven’t ever gotten banned from Twitter, unlike some people-”

Snowy throws a glove at him, which he ducks with a laugh. It’s unfair, Augustin thinks mutinously as they begin the next event, that even with the pallid white neon lights in the middle of the circus where they’re playing the freaks, Kent looks perfect.

He doesn’t trail Kent around like a fucking dog, because this is a televised event and if he did, Angelique would give him hell until he was dead. She’s been texting him strange, cryptic things ever since she came to visit, and he’s damn sure that the only thing stopping her from saying anything outright is the fact that Troy’s been blushing furiously around him for a few days now. That, and the fact that he went snooping through Jeff’s phone while Kent distracted him and found a ticket to Boston for the All-Star break.

What can he say? He likes to cut out the middleman, and if his sister wants to date a guy who wears turtle-patterned ties to games, so be it. He can think of many worse players for her to be dating than Jeffrey Troy.

He doesn’t want her pity, anyways. He’s doing just fine grappling with this great big thing that he can’t have. He’s wrestled it down to size, locked it under the floor, and so what if it keeps bumping its massive head against the trapdoor, shaking the hinges in an effort to escape? He’s buried it, and it’ll stay buried for as long as he forces it down.

He ends up talking to Snowy a bit more, which leads to him talking to the other goalies, which leads to him holding stilted conversations with old teammates, which finally leads to him being chirped by Brewski about not having any real friends.

“And Parson doesn’t count!” Brewski shouts after him as he skates away for his turn on the breakaway challenge. He flips Brewski off over his shoulder, earning him a barked laugh, and dipsy-doodles his way through a breakaway shot that just dribbles by the high glove of Snow.

“You’re not supposed to try, Berenger!” Snow yells at him as he skates away to the roar of the crowd.

“I wasn’t!” Augustin calls back with a grin, loud enough that everyone hears. Across the ice, he can hear Kent’s laughter among the rest of the players, clearer than the others.

The Aeros sent one of their wingers, a kid named Kevin Mitsuya, to replace their sick alternate captain Jared Whisner, who was himself replacing their injured star center Pavel Petrov. He’s standing stiffly at the edge of the bench when Augustin skates over, but there’s too many wires and cameras in the way for either of them to move until the rest of the breakaway challenge is over.

“Hey,” Mitsuya tries nervously, and Augustin can’t fucking look at him. He’s twenty-one, fresh from the AHL, and he looks so fucking young. He’s two years older than Augustin was and he looks so young.

And he looks happy. Well, not at this very moment, but whenever Augustin sees the Aeros play, they gather around Mitsuya like he’s the soul of their team. Gavin Rathers, their other rookie, is far and away the talented one of the two, but what Mitsuya lacks in sheer skill, he makes up for in grit and heart. He’s the team’s glue, and he loves hockey more than anything.

Augustin doesn’t miss Jason Kirby often, but when he does, it’s like a piece of shrapnel between his ribs.

“Hey,” he replies shortly, and there’s nothing more left for him. Mitsuya nods, lips pressed together, and they stand in awkward silence until Mitsuya skates away for his shot at the puck-control relay.

“Were you talking to Mitsuya?” Kent asks during a commercial break, his tone artificially pleasant. Augustin watches as Mitsuya is chirped and gets his legs tapped by the sticks of half the Central Division for his respectable score on arguably one of the harder challenges of the day.

“Not really,” he says, words tumbling mechanically off of his tongue, “Why, jealous?”

Any rebuttal is lost in the arrival of an irate Dustin Snow: “Second fucking place because of you, you fucking French fuck! You owe me so much fucking vodka after this is over.”

“I’m still mic’d,” Kent says, scooting away, “Still mic’d! Think of the children!”

In the end, Kent comes in second in both of his events too, losing his potential third-straight fastest skater title by 0.2 seconds. That’s not as bad as Augustin’s second-place in the accuracy shooting contest, which he loses by 0.01 seconds to the rookie from the Canucks. It’s such a negligible difference that the referees ask if he wants to give it another go, to which he says, “No, I’ll lose with grace.”

On the bus back to the hotel, Kent mutinously mutters that first place in the passing relay helped him to lose with grace, and it probably did.

Every year, the clown show takes more out of him than a five-game road trip. He’s hot, he’s bothered, he’s sunburnt in January because his skin is essentially reflective, and the hotel they put everyone in only has singles, so he’s alone, too. He can hear talking out in the hallway off and on, but his body is starting to conform to the shape of the bed, and he’s so tired that he couldn’t even take his suit off.

So he does what all people naturally do when they’ve been bored for more than two minutes in a row. He throws the Mighty Ducks up on the hotel TV and opens Twitter.

His account is anonymous and private, so he doesn’t have to worry about accidentally liking anything as he scrolls through the All-Star weekend posts that are being thrown up willy-nilly by every organization involved. There’s a lot of PR spots, and a couple good pictures of Augustin signing kids’ jerseys that might get Jerry off his back.

There’s also a lot of fucking media about him and Kent. Not enough to overshadow the whole event, but enough that the Las Vegas Aces are trending, and so is the tag DoubleOrNothing.

He’s gonna have to have a talk with PR about that stupid nickname when he gets back.

Most of the tweets are pretty benign, talking about their scores and interviews, and looking forward to their performance at the three-on-three tomorrow. Some of them, though, are both extremely far-fetched and yet uncomfortably close to reality. One of the most popular ones reads: Get you a girl who will look at you like Kent Parson looks at Augustin Berenger, with a picture of Kent watching him do the accuracy challenge.

His chin is propped on the end of his stick, and it might just be the camera quality, but his expression is softer than Augustin has ever seen. He traces the picture with the pad of his thumb, zooming in to examine Kent’s face: the soft line of his gently smiling mouth, the downturn of his grey eyes, the upward twist of his hazel eyebrows. It’s very clear that he doesn’t know there's a camera on him, and Augustin feels as if he’s somehow intruded on a private moment.

And then he notices that his sister, in all her public, verified glory, fucking retweeted the damn thing.

He calls her, and when she picks up on the fifth ring, he yells: “Stop fucking retweeting things!” and hangs up before she can say anything to defend herself. She texts him a few seconds later: how did you find that if you weren’t staring at pictures of the two of you? because I know your petty ass doesn’t follow me

He slams his phone facedown on the mattress and resists the urge to scream. Below the floorboards, a monstrous heart is beating out of control.

The idea that players party during the All-Star weekend is categorically false. Most of the players are either a little bit too old or a little bit too bummed about not getting to go to Palm Desert or whatever else their teammates are doing to take advantage of Tampa’s dubious nightlife. Still, Augustin gets a text from Snowy a couple hours after the Skills Competition ends, as he’s drying off his hair with a towel after a very long, very hot shower: team canada reunion tonight. meet u in the lobby. bring the interloper if you must. wear black. we’re in mourning.

Kent’s room is a few doors down the hall. He knocks on the door once he’s gotten changed. Kent opens it, blinking blearily and wearing nothing but a rumpled pair of sweatpants, bare, freckled chest and torso on full display. The sight of him standing there, shoulders slanted against the doorframe, can only be described as artistic.

Augustin swallows the warm spike deep in his stomach and asks, “How would you like to crash a Team Canada reunion?”

Kent reacts way too enthusiastically to the prospect, especially for a guy who presumably just woke up from a nap, “Let me take a shower and then we can go.”

Augustin manages to steal and hide all the American-themed clothing items under his bed while Kent’s in the shower, and if Kent stumbles around looking for his American flag snapback and can’t find it, Augustin can just mention that he saw it on the hat rack before they left.

Kent doesn’t ask, but takes unsubtle revenge by wearing his ugly Rimouski snapback and the most heinous cat-patterned socks that Augustin’s ever seen in his goddamn life.

“Swoops gave them to me.”

“Yeah, and it fucking shows.”

The motley crew that Snow has assembled is more interloper than it is Canadian, but the more people there are in the low-lit Tampa bar a few blocks from the hotel, the less that Augustin finds he needs to talk. Kent does enough of that himself, getting into it with the Canadian captains and making foolish bets based on the outcome of tomorrow’s three-on-three round robin.

“I wish they still fucking let us draft teams again,” someone says, though Augustin doesn’t catch who, “I cannot fucking stand that the two of you are going to be on the same team.”

“We’re easily marketable,” Augustin replies cynically, “Double or nothing.”

“Yeah, we all saw the fucking tweets about you two media darlings,” Snowy mutters drunkenly, slinging an arm around Augustin so his vodka-scented breath is warm against the skin of his neck. Augustin looks over at him and winks, and Snowy winks back. He’s attractive enough, sandy-haired and built, but he’s a little crazy in the way all goalies are, and so painfully in love with his girlfriend that it often verges on embarrassing.

That doesn’t seem to be stopping Kent from glaring daggers.

“You guys need to get off of Twitter,” Augustin says, lifting his water to his mouth, “Seriously, the internet is a disease. Read a book. Read several books, actually, and they have to have words in them.”

Someone down the table boos. A crumpled up napkin hits him on the forehead, which causes a bit of water to trickle from the corner of his mouth and down his neck, saturating the collar of his shirt: “Shit.”

When he looks up, Kent’s cheekbones are dusted with pink, and he’s studiously engrossed in a conversation with Brewski across the table, avoiding eye contact. Augustin narrows his eyes and casually pops open the top button of his shirt, stretching his arms onto the back of the booth so that the seams strain over his shoulders. The pink intensifies.

Hockey players and their peripheral vision. But Kent doesn't say anything, and the disgruntled beast grows louder.

Here’s the thing: Augustin is endlessly cautious. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t hook up with people who might know his name, and doesn’t stay the night in a house that isn’t his own, in a room that’s not his own. He has to be, because one false move and he’ll be turned over like a dirty penny, tossed into the well for a few good draft picks and a nice tidy return. He’s careful, but it’s a business decision at the end of the day.

Kent is careful in a different way, because Kent has ghosts.

Augustin grew up in a small town with Catholic parents, played hockey with the whitest, straightest rural teenage boys on the face of the goddamn earth, and yet this might be the part of himself that he hates the least. Meanwhile, Kent Parson grew up in one of the largest, most liberal cities in the world, with a mother who talked gaily to Augustin about queer safety in libraries and a boyfriend in Juniors, and yet somehow it’s one of the parts of himself that he seems to hate the most.

When Augustin was four years old, he fell through the ice on the shinny pond near the Patenaudes’ farm. His father had fished him out in less than three seconds, but he still remembers the feeling of falling, the cold that shocked the air from his lungs, and the burn of water flooding in.

He refused to go out on the ice the next year, wailing and screaming, until his mother took her young son’s tearstained face in between her hands and sharply told him, “Essayes simplement.”

Just try.

And he did try. He fell in love for the first time at five years old, with the sound of the puck hitting the back of the net and the cold air burning his lungs. It did not mean he wasn’t scared: he was more scared than he had ever been in his life until he turned eighteen. But the two were not mutually exclusive. They never are.

There’s a lot of parts inside him, which are gnarled, twisted, broken and shattered, that he hates. But this is not one of them.

Kent throws his head back when he laughs, and his blond hair shakes. He pats Brewski on the back, cheeks flush, and he’s every inch the captain of the Pacific Division that everyone chose, and every time he looks over, his eyes dart down to Augustin’s lips, and Augustin wants.

He wants Kent Parson more than anyone he’s ever wanted before. Maybe he’s even a little in love with him. Who could blame him? It’s almost impossible not to be.

The monster stirs, grumbling, from the hollows of the earth. It claws at its cage made of rib bones, leaving gashes along the soft viscera and pulsing muscles of his heart. He feels drunk on the feeling of it, light-headed and stupid.

Snow plasters himself onto Augustin as the night goes on and he consumes more liquor. He talks quietly in Augustin’s ear, yammering on about his girlfriend Casey, but all Augustin can see is that Kent is staring at the two of them, stone-faced and cold. It must not look suspicious, if nobody is chirping them, but Kent looks like he wants to start throwing glasses. It rakes over Augustin’s skin like the broken shards.

He ends up begging off early, because Snow is genuinely inebriated and needs to be goose-stepped back to the hotel. Kent stands without Augustin asking or telling him to, calmly paying his tab and giving a boisterous goodbye to the rest of the players as they half-carry Snowy out of the bar and into the cool night air.

Their arms overlap around Snow’s waist as they guide him across the pavement, and the heat is almost unbearable. Augustin shifts his arm away, but then Kent slowly, purposefully moves his up until their forearms are flush against each other, rolled up sleeves leaving no barrier between skin. When Augustin looks over, Kent’s looking straight ahead, as if he has no idea what’s going on.

Snow, of course, is completely oblivious to the game of gay chicken happening on his back. Eight vodka sodas in two hours will do that to someone. He pinches Augustin's cheeks between his fingers, a loopy grin stretching across his face as they haul him up the hotel steps, “You're so hot, dude.”

“Thanks, man,” Augustin replies, batting away the hand gently, “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“You coming out too, Snow?” Kent asks sardonically from Snowy’s other side as they stroll casually through the empty lobby, “Giving Providence the monopoly on gay hockey players?”

Augustin bites his tongue at the undertone of something dark in Kent’s voice.

“No, no no,” Snowy says insistently, holding up a finger in protest, “Listen. I've been hanging out with Jack's mustachioed friend when he comes by. He told me about male bonding and healthy masculinity, and how I should tell my fucking bros when they're, uh…dude, so fucking pretty.”

Kent takes a couple more mulish steps before he asks, “Am I not pretty?”

“Ugh, shut the fuck up, you mini Ken doll,” Snowy grumbles, head lolling onto Augustin’s shoulder, a warm solid weight. Augustin laughs at the look on Kent’s face and hauls Snowy onto his shoulder better as they get into the hotel elevator.

“Snowy, where’s your room key?”

“Huh?”

“Room key,” Augustin repeats, dragging Snow out of the elevator and onto their floor, which is dead silent from all the sleepy old men they dragged out for this event who are now in bed at a reasonable hour, “Dustin, c’mon, this is ridiculous. Where’s your key?”

“Wallet.”

It’s not in his wallet. Kent riffles through the massive leather thing twice before shaking his head. “Not here. Why do you have a Blockbuster card?”

“Fuck, man, that’s not important,” Augustin wheezes, because Snowy’s getting heavy, almost dead weight as he nods off on Augustin’s shoulder. He feels his knees buckle, “Alright, I guess we…fuck, I’m gonna drop him.”

“Here, put him in my room,” Kent says, swiping his card through the slot and shoving open the door. Augustin hobbles over to the bed and deposits the goalie on top of the pristine covers, where he spread-eagles across white and promptly falls asleep.

They both stare at him for a minute, and Augustin takes a picture for Casey before he says, “You gonna get cozy with the enemy?”

“I didn’t think this through,” Kent grimaces, staring at the massive goalie taking up the bottom half of his bed. “Do you think we can…pick him up?”

“And put him where?”

“I was thinking your room,” Kent says, his joking tone about as artificial as aspartame, “You two can cuddle some more.”

Augustin’s been practicing taking the high road recently, so he just turns and walks out. He can hear Kent following on his heels, and turns after he unlocks his door, blocking the doorway with his body and making sure to keep his voice down, “Apologize or sleep in the hallway.”

Kent ducks under his arm quicker than he can manage to catch, snickering as he darts into the room. Augustin rolls his eyes and lets the door fall shut.

It’s almost the same as a roadie, except for the very obvious absence of a second queen-sized bed in the hotel room. The bed is big enough that they don’t have to worry about touching, but Augustin is suddenly very aware of the false distance as he and Kent stand on opposite sides of the bed, quietly changing out of their suits. The humour fizzles in dead air, Kent’s weird…whatever the fuck sucking it out like an open airplane window.

He counts the buttons of his shirt as he pops them open, and there’s the slippery snnnk of Kent loosening his tie that cuts the silence in half.

“Why are you in such a pissy mood?” he asks abruptly, “Is it because you lost the fastest skater comp? Because you were the one who fucked up your start, not me.”

“I’m not pissy,” Kent says, annoyance seeping out of his every pore, “I’m fine.”

“Yeah,” Augustin snorts, tossing his shirt over the back of the nearby desk chair and going hunting through his suitcase for something to wear, “Whatever.”

Kent’s impatience is both a vice and a virtue. He tosses his tie onto the desk and mutinously says, “You were flirting with him.”

“Who?” Augustin looks up to see Kent staring out the window, arms crossed. He abandons his hunt for his old Habs t-shirt, “Snowy? Yeah, man, I mean… Snow flirts with anything that moves and breathes. He would flirt with a cactus if he thought he could get a reaction out of it. He’s literally dating the nurse that took care of him when he hurt his leg last season.”

“Right,” Kent says quietly, and the lock keeping the monster trapped, that’s been snapped for a little while now, falls apart completely, ripping the duct tape and glue that he’s used to keep it working.

“What? Does that offend your newfound Victorian sensibilities?” Augustin mutters, grabbing the first shirt he can find and shoving his head into it. “Should I avert my eyes from the temptation of his bare ankles?”

“No,” Kent says stiffly, wrenching at the buttons of his collared shirt until they pop out of the buttonholes. One, two, and then he snorts derisively, hands slapping the legs of his khakis, “Flirt with whoever you want, man. You probably don’t want to get rusty.”

Augustin’s voice is less of a sharp jab and more of a growl when he asks, “What the fuck does that mean?”

Kent may be a reasonable guy, but only when it comes to everything and everyone else. When it comes to him—what he feels, what he thinks—he goes from man of reason to biting, feral cat. No wonder he and that fucking grey furball get along so well.

“I’m just saying you don’t have to go over to theirs anymore,” Kent says, taking his belt off and rolling it up neatly, “The apartment’s walls are thick-”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Augustin swears, “I’m not inviting fucking hookups back to the apartment.”

Kent has the gall to act confused, “Why not?”

“Because, contrary to popular belief, I’m not a fucking asshole, Kent,” Augustin snarls in return, keeping his voice down so none of the conked out Eastern hockey players or the wired ones on Pacific time like they are overhear through the walls. “And because what do you think they’ll do if they see you? You’re not just some hockey player. You’re Kent fucking Parson, ESPN darling. The entire country knows your face.”

“Augustin-” Kent tries, but he’s on a roll, and he couldn’t stop now if he tried.

After all, at the end of the day, the season only has four more months left, and policies of deterrence through mutually assured destruction famously work all the time.

“Listen, asshole, I don’t know what game you’re playing, because you’re the one who said you couldn’t do this,” he bites out, “You’re the one who said that you couldn’t do this with me, and then you look at me like that, and go headhunting for me in games, and get pissy about me flirting with a guy I will never fuck but then suggest I should bring random men back to our apartment, and fucking crawl into my bed-”

“You fucking told me to!”

“-this isn’t fucking fair,” he seethes, the rot that’s been living in his chest cracking open and bleeding across the floor. He doesn’t move from his side of the bed. He won’t give Kent the fucking satisfaction. “You know what? I don’t like to be entitled, but this is not fucking fair to me. You can’t…string me along and make me think…” That you want this. That you want me. “You can’t have it both ways.”

“What the fuck do you want me to say?” Kent hisses, face contorted into a fucked-up Halloween mask of his typical charming expression. Augustin laughs humourlessly. Even now, he can’t bring himself to yell. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“Don’t be fucking slow, it doesn’t suit you. You have to choose. Do you want me or not?”

“Fuck, Augustin,” Kent swears, pressing his palms to his forehead, “It’s not that fucking simple!”

Augustin is not a nice person by nature. He thinks maybe he used to be, at least in the ways that people could tell and appreciate, but now all he has left is injured pride and a couple dozen bones to pick. Nice is for people who have something to spare, something to gamble. He doesn’t have that luxury.

“I am not Jack Zimmermann,” he says lowly, and Kent’s face turns grey in the darkness, the one lit lamp in the corner not enough to illuminate the puce and red.

“Don’t,” he says lowly, “say another fucking word, or I’m going to start saying things that I’ll regret.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Augustin says bitterly, “You were in love with Jack, and he fucking…rejected you, or whatever-”

“Rejected me? He tried to kill himself to get away from me.” Kent hisses, hands combing through his hair over and over, “Is that what you wanted to trick me into saying? Surprise! The last boy I kissed before you was seven years ago and it was so great that he almost offed himself. Do you feel better now that you know it’s not your fault I can’t do this? Are you fucking satisfied?”

His chest is heaving at the end, and the world has become very small.

Augustin sidesteps the bed, approaching Kent as if he were a rat caught in a trap, struggling to gnaw off its own tail. Kent stares up at him defiantly, eyes shining and angrier than he’s ever seen. They’re nearly chest to chest now, and Augustin has to bite his lip in order to bring himself back to reality.

Here’s the thing: Augustin knows anger better than anyone. He can count the number of days in the last seven years where he hasn’t been some form of angry, bitter, vindictive and cruel on his hands. For seven years, he’s been so brutally angry that it’s been slowly killing him, a poison seeping out of his heart and into his veins.

And he’s so fucking tired.

Kent’s still glaring at him, like he’s waiting for Augustin to bite back, because that’s all he thinks Augustin knows how to do. Maybe he’s right. Augustin doesn’t know how to be nice or kind, and no one will ever expect it of him, showing his soft underbelly. It’s terrifying to roll over and hope to God that you trusted the right person, especially when there are already scars.

Essayes simplement, his sister’s voice says quietly in the back of his head. Just try.

“No, he didn’t,” Augustin finally says quietly, “And I think you know that he didn’t. It was always an accident. You just don’t want to believe that what you felt for him wasn’t enough to stop him from doing it,” he sighs when Kent flinches away, “So you’re fucking scared, or haunted, or whatever the fuck. But I’m not Jack, and you’re not eighteen anymore. We’re both different people.”

The fight leaves Kent all at once, his stature deflating until he’s just a man standing in the middle of a dark room, unable to meet Augustin’s eyes. He just sways in place, a leaf in the breeze.

“Are you done psychoanalyzing me like I’m one of your fucking hockey games?” he says wearily, “Can we just…go to sleep now?”

“Kent-”

“What?”

“Hey, don’t fucking treat me like this is my fault,” he snaps, “I’m not the one who won’t go all in. You are. Do you not grasp how fucking embarrassing this is for me? Do you think I’d be standing here like a weepy little fuck if I wasn’t already all in?”

“Fuck, Augustin-”

“You don’t have to like me, or want me,” he snorts derisively, “Somehow, I think I’ll live. But you have to choose. Get in the car or fuck right off out of it, but either way, close the fucking door.”

Kent’s eyes are glassy as he bitterly asks, “Why tonight?”

Because I’m hanging from this cliff by my fingertips. Because you’re beautiful, and it hurts to look at you. Because I think I might love you. Because I think if I wake up tomorrow and you’re not there, I’m slowly going to let the fear win, and I will never have you once the fear starts winning.

“Because I can’t do it after I beat you at the Olympics,” he says sarcastically, because he can’t let all the walls down at once. He’s not fucking mental, “Because we’re not going. So send your thank-you card or your condolences card to Gary, because-”

Kent surges forward, grabs him by the collar, and slams his mouth over Augustin’s so hard that their teeth click together before Augustin can re-orient himself.

Oh.

Augustin closes his eyes, feeling Kent’s free hand wrap its fingers around the back of his neck and pulling him in. He tilts Kent’s head back, mouth parting slightly as the kiss deepens, losing himself in the feeling of it in case this is the second last time he ever gets to do this.

“You need to shut the fuck up about the Olympics,” Kent whispers once their lips part, hand still fisted in the collar of his worn Memorial Cup championship shirt. His voice is gravelly, “You’ve been so fucking annoying about it this whole fucking week.”

Woozily, Augustin feels his teeth bare themselves into a grin, “Well, see, I’ve never been to Korea-”

“Oh my fucking God,” Kent mutters, and lunges upwards, yanking Augustin down to meet him halfway. He tastes like cranberry and mint from his single drink at the bar, and it’s the closest Augustin’s been to intoxication in years.

Walking them back, he presses Kent up against the huge window, bracing a hand against the cool glass as Kent pulls their hips together by his belt loops, gasping for breath against the corner of his mouth. Fingers tug insistently at his shirt as he mouths across Kent’s jaw and down across his throat.

“Use your words,” he mutters against the shell of Kent’s ear before kissing back down along the line of his jaw.

“You’re such a fucking jackass,” Kent pants, curling his fingers against the nape of Augustin’s neck. A chill runs down his spine as Kent squirms, their bodies flush, “Oh my God, you’re such a fuckwad, it’s unreal.”

Those are not the words that Augustin is looking for, but he’ll take what he can get.

He manages to maneuver them onto the bed, which blissfully doesn’t creak or make a sound as Kent falls back onto it and pulls Augustin on top of him, tugging his shirt over his head so that it gets stuck and nearly pops a seam before it can come off.

“You’re not very good at that,” Augustin mutters against Kent’s neck, an off-handed comment as he goes to work on the dip of his collarbones. Kent goes from squirming to still in less than a second, and his heart drops.

Not again.

But when he draws away, Kent’s hands are there to keep him in place; one on the back of his neck, the other skating up his side. The touch is feather-light, curious as it maps the planes of Augustin’s lower back and ribs. Augustin has to bite back a groan at the gentle scratch of nail against skin.

“What’s wrong?” He manages to pant, because what’s wrong for him is that they’re both still wearing clothes.

“I haven’t…” Kent sucks in a shuddering breath. His eyes are as wide as moons, but they’ll look anywhere but Augustin’s face. He pulls back, and his hand gently tilts Kent’s chin so that their eyes meet. Kent swallows, cheeks grey with flush, “I haven’t been with anyone in…a while.”

“Okay,” Augustin says quietly, “Okay. We’ll go slow. I’ve got you.”

“Okay,” Kent echoes, though a characteristic smirk peels across his face, “But don’t go easy on me.”

“God forbid,” Augustin mutters, ducking in once more.

Kissing turns to fumbling, and more than once Kent starts laughing at how much trouble he’s having with various buttons and zippers, snickering even as he sighs and his fingers press bruises into Augustin’s hips. Augustin eventually buries his smile in the crook of Kent’s neck and says, “Alright, this is getting embarrassing. Let me take care of it.”

“Embarrassing? You’re such a fucking-”

“Souleves vos hanches, s'il te plaît.”

Laughter turns into swearing, because Kent Parson has a dirty fucking mouth, and hands winding through Augustin’s hair, playing and tugging at the curls in equal measure. It’s just like riding a bicycle, innuendo unintended, and Augustin comes to find that Kent’s adaptability to his circumstances can be applied to more than ice sports.

For years, he’s been having hookups with attractive, anonymous, dubiously safe men. It’s a purely physical reaction combined with a need for closeness, of skin against skin in both the process and the aftermath. This is entirely different, the same difference between a candle flame and a roaring forest fire. It’s nowhere near as easy, and it’s certainly not perfect, but Augustin’s convinced that he’s losing his mind, because there’s good and then there’s this.

They both lay on top of the sheets after everything is said, done, and cleaned up, shirtless and with their legs tangled together. Kent’s hair brushes Augustin’s arm as they stare at the ceiling, catching their breath.

“Huh,” Kent says after a few moments, the top sheet rucked up and twisted around his hips. Augustin turns to look at him, still breathless and feeling as though his muscles have melted into jelly. His heart is going a mile a minute.

“What?” He manages to pant. He’s still not sure that this is real, and not a spectacular fucking dream that he’s going to wake up from and mourn in the morning. His arm is starting to fall asleep from the weight of Kent’s head pillowed against his bicep, but he’d rather cut it off than move it right now.

“Almost a decade and yet I still haven’t lost my touch,” Kent says smugly, and Augustin can’t imagine a single more “Kent Parson” response to what they just did than that. He yanks the arm away so Kent’s head hits the mattress and props himself up on an elbow, glaring down into green-grey eyes.

“If you say no homo again, I’ll swear to Christ-”

A hand wraps around the back of his neck and pulls him down, lips pressing warm over his until he’s dizzy from the lack of air.

He falls more than lowers himself back down onto the mattress, face pressed to the sheets and body half-laying across Kent’s warm, soft skin. He buries his nose in the crook of a neck that smells like expensive cologne and salt. A finger toys with his hair, lightly circling the one curl on the back of his head that sticks up no matter what he does, and he lays a gentle, feathery kiss against the cord of Kent’s neck with every three circles.

It’s funny. Augustin fucking hates Tampa, but right now, he would rather be here than almost anywhere else.

“The only thing that would make this better would be if we were in Ko-”

Kent’s gentle ministrations turn into pinching fingers. “Shut the fuck up, Augustin.”

When he finally regains movement in his legs and gets up to take out his contact lenses before they petrify to his eyes, Kent makes an injured noise. He’s half-asleep, and blinks blearily up at Augustin, “Where are you going?”

“To take out my eyeballs,” Augustin says over his shoulder as he tugs on his discarded boxers and walks over to the blinds to shut them. Luckily, the bed is pretty far from the window, so they didn’t accidentally give downtown Tampa a show, but the city lights will make it hard to sleep. In the darkness, though, he can still see Kent sit up as he makes his way over to the bathroom.

“I beg your fucking pardon?”

“Relax,” Augustin mutters, hitting the bathroom light and wincing at the brightness, “Contacts.”

He peels them out of his eyes and puts on his glasses in time to see Kent’s disgusted face, “That’s how you take them out? That’s so fucking gross, I can’t even- hey, you look like Clark Kent in those glasses, that’s kinda hot.”

“Do you always talk this much after sex?” Augustin asks, hitting the bathroom lights and turning off the lamp with a click before making his way back over to the bed, “Shove over, this is my side of the bed.”

There’s a rustle as Kent shifts, and Augustin rolls onto the bed, pulling the comforter off the floor where it fell sometime in the middle of it all, and tucking his legs under it. Kent’s gone still on the other side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and Augustin can hear the whirr of his brain ticking. His gut hollows out.

“What?” he asks, his voice coming out flat. Kent turns his neck with a rustle of cloth, grey eyes shining in the thin beam of light coming in between the gauzy curtains.

“What are we doing?”

It’s like waking up. The question is one he’s been dreading, the one which has no answer.

What are they doing? He hasn’t dated anyone in his life, so surely not that. For all his monumental foresight, all his contingencies upon contingencies, he’s never once considered wanting someone so badly that he’d jump like a lemming off a fucking cliff for the chance to spend one night in the same bed. And now they’re here, a few inches apart on a hotel mattress, and Augustin has no idea what to do next.

He almost wants to laugh. Only Kent could possibly make him act so irrationally.

“Dude,” Kent says dryly, “I didn’t know I asked you for the fucking secrets of the universe. Can you say something before I vomit?”

“Here’s my proposal,” Augustin murmurs, turning over to face Kent, “We’ll keep it…casual. We’re just friends. Teammates. ”

“Who have sex,” Kent interjects, because he seems to find that very important. “Routinely. And kiss on the mouth.”

“Sure. I care about you, you care about me, and it’s only, like, one degree more than what we would usually do, anyways.” Augustin snorts, “I wasn’t expecting you to start calling me pet names and coo and be all gross and shit. We’re not, like…boyfriends, or whatever.”

But we could be, his little voice says hopefully.

What is the fucking matter with you? he thinks in return.

“And when the season ends…”

He’ll be gone, unless Vegas decides to re-sign him. It’s good, he tells himself, to have a set expiration date. It’ll keep him from getting his hopes up too high.

“We’ll reassess.”

Kent’s silent for a moment before he dryly asks, “Like taxes?”

“I don’t fucking know, I have an accountant.” Augustin mutters, “So do we have a deal?”

Kent’s lips compress in the grey light, “So I’m just your…fuckbuddy?”

It’s an ugly word that makes his skin crawl, “No. Fuck no. I…” he inhales sharply, his glasses squishing awkwardly against his face as he reaches out to place a hand on Kent’s cheek. His thumb roves gently across high cheekbone, “I’ve never…I only ever dated one guy, and I was fucking…awful at it.”

He had tried so hard, harder than he ever tried at anything before, but it wasn’t enough for Sebastien, because at the end of the day, Augustin wasn’t enough for Baz. He was too cold, too moody, and ultimately too in love with hockey.

He remembers what Baz said to him during that last fight like it was yesterday: “I’ve been cheated on before, Augustin, but never have I been cheated on with a fucking sport.”

But if anyone’s going to understand that, it’s the man laying across from him.

“I just…”

“Don’t like not being good at things,” Kent surmises with a yawn, and then wriggles closer until they’re nearly nose to nose. His voice is sleepy, “Fine, I’ll take your deal, but I want to be wooed, Augustin. Do you fucking hear me? I want to be wooed. You can start by being the big spoon.”

He rolls over without another word, and Augustin can’t help but wonder what the fuck he’s gotten himself into as he takes off his glasses and tucks himself around Kent’s body, his arm falls into the crook of his bare waist.

“Set a fucking alarm, Parson,” he mutters into Kent’s hair before he falls into a dreamless sleep.

The sunlight serves as their alarm. Even though they’re both three hours behind on the time, Kent still rises with the sun, stirring in Augustin’s arms with a contented sigh. It’s so warm, and his eyelids are so heavy, that when Kent wriggles out from under him to go shower, he can’t even muster up the lust to go join him. He must be getting old.

Eventually, Kent whaps him across the face with a pillow until he snatches it away and mutters, “Bon fucking matin.”

“Go shower, asshole.”

He thinks the whole thing might have still been a dream until he notices a love bite on his clavicle in the mirror as he’s drying off his hair. It’s a lurid purple, and there’s a hint of teeth marks around the edges. When he taps it, it twinges just barely.

“A gift? You shouldn’t have, how thoughtful of you-” he says as he exits the bathroom, only to see that Kent has disappeared. He only panics for a moment before he sees that there’s a new text on his phone, laying faceup on the bedside table: i needed new clothes.

He texts back: I mean you didn’t NEED them.

He doesn’t check Kent’s text in reply as he puts his suit back on, shirt slightly wrinkled and his trousers absolutely demolished. He ends up having to take them off and steam them in the bathroom with the shower running hot. He sits on the bed as he waits, and the enormity of the situation crashes into him all at once.

He slept with Kent Parson, who is gay, just like him, and also one of the best hockey players in the world. They’re in a relationship of sorts, with blurry borders and fragile lines. He can try and play it cool all he wants, but the truth is that Kent now holds something that Augustin hasn’t given anyone in years: the map to all his softest, most vulnerable parts. The easiest places to do the most damage.

The little voice in his head mutters, he could-

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he mutters, standing from the bed. He can think of very few things that Kent could do to hurt him; he knows the bare minimum of Augustin’s deep well of fear and shame or whatever dramatic abstract concept he wants to apply to it. As long as Kent never knows, statistically the chances of damage are near zero.

He knocks on Kent’s door once his pants are unwrinkled but still slightly damp, and finds that the deadbolt is popped, leaving the door slightly ajar. He pushes it open.

Kent’s tying his tie when Augustin walks in, hair slightly damp and hanging in strings across his forehead. He looks up and smiles, dimples appearing in his cheeks when he sees Augustin, and Augustin has to place his hand on the wall to catch his breath.

What he should say is something along the lines of you’re beautiful. Instead, what he says is, “you look like a Beach Boy.”

He really needs to work on this vulnerability thing.

“Thanks,” Kent snorts, tightening the lilac tie and folding his collar down. “And you look like an Edwardian schoolboy.”

Augustin looks down at his outfit. Fair play, really, “Where’s your guest?”

“Snowy wasn’t in my room when I got here,” Kent lifts a small piece of hotel stationary and waves it around, “He found his key card. Apparently it was in his shoe. Don’t ask me why.”

“Huh,” Augustin says, checking his watch as he walks over to the deadbolt and un-pops it so the door shuts with a firm click. “So he’s long gone, and we have fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes for what-” Kent’s voice chokes at the end as Augustin walks over and drops to his knees, “Oh my fucking God.”

They’re late to the bus by a couple of minutes.

“Hey, man,” Brewster says to Kent as they slide into their seats after being firmly chastised by the NHL media liaisons for their 180 seconds of tardiness, “You oversleep?”

“Huh?” Kent’s voice is mildly panicked, “Why?”

“Your shirt’s all fucked up.”

Augustin has to stifle a laugh as Kent fixes the buttons on his shirt with a scowl. “I told you to set a fucking alarm, Parson.”

“Fuck you,” Kent shoots back, and it holds all the more weight when Augustin feels his mouth curve into a sharp grin.

“Fucking the both of you, shut the fuck up please,” Snowy groans, massive dark sunglasses covering his eyes as he drinks the shitty hotel coffee out of a massive paper cup, “Oh my fucking God.”

The rest of their time in Tampa is almost pleasant. It helps that the Pacific, despite their shit luck in uniforms, wins the three-on-three round robin. They’re both mic’d for it, and seem to collectively agree on making a game out of dancing close to the truth like the adrenaline junkies that they inevitably are.

“Hey sweetheart,” Kent calls him at one point, during a break between periods, “Can you pass better, please?”

“Anything for you, lovebug,” Augustin replies, and Brewski makes a massive retching sound that sends the whole bench cracking up. Kent grins at him, beautiful despite the horrendous uniforms, and blows Augustin an exaggerated kiss.

He grabs it out of the air and lunges for Brewski, “Open wide, Brewster!”

The clips go up on Twitter almost immediately and Augustin knows that he won’t know peace for weeks, but somehow, he can’t bring himself to care. Tomorrow, maybe he will, but today, he doesn’t.

His permanently-online sister texts him on their way to the airport that night, linking a video of the interaction to her caption: congratulations. If he breaks your heart, I’ll kill him.

Kent, looking over his shoulder at his screen, snorts, “She’s fucking perceptive, isn’t she?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” Augustin replies, waiting for Kent to pull out his own phone before he texts back: It’ll be fine. Tell Troy his days are numbered.

“Um,” Kent says, staring at his ringing phone a few seconds later, “Why’s Swoops calling me?”

His hand is settled, warm and solid, on Augustin’s knee. Augustin says, “Don’t worry about it.”

Notes:

Normal people: i love you
augustin: do you know how fucking embarrassing this is

this chapter was so hard to write, it's not even funny. i decided this is going to be twenty chapters total, maybe twenty-one if i can't keep my fucking yap shut like the last fourteen chapters. every time i see the word count it's like a fucking jumpscare

anyways, enjoy this while it lasts. it's about to be the pits! I know I should be updating the tags as we go, but i also don't want to spoil anything, so it's the pits for everyone

Chapter 15

Summary:

in which a bet is won, paradise is lost, and hockey always takes as much as it gives

Nothing changes, or at least, nothing changes much.

They’re in a strange, fucked-up version of the honeymoon phase. Outside the apartment, everything is exactly the same as before All-Star Weekend: they play good hockey, they hang out with the rest of the Aces, they go out and come back. Nobody would ever suspect that anything had changed, because mostly, nothing has.

Except that inside the apartment, Kent makes up for seven years of celibacy. It’s fucking awesome. It turns out that teenage hormones have nothing on the feeling of winning a game against the Blackhawks and dancing on their graves. Victory is a hell of an aphrodisiac.

Augustin ends up in his bed more often than not, because the guest room reminds him too much of his sister, and Kit, his first-born child, haunts the living room.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Augustin had said once, out of breath and tucked between Kent’s knees on the couch with his fly undone and shirt in a pile on the floor. “You’re the fucking human being. Put the cat in the other room.”

From her perch by the door, Kit meowed, and Kent couldn't do it, “No, I’m serious, get up. Bedroom.”

“Oh my fucking God,” Augustin muttered, getting up and walking down the hall. Kent admired the shifting muscles of his back as he made his way there before following, making sure the door was firmly closed.

It’s a weird fucked-up honeymoon phase, because most nights, especially after they win games, or lose games, or tie games and then take them to the shootout before winning them, they have sex with varying degrees of intensity, and then go to the rink as if nothing has happened the night before. Rinse and repeat.

Their hands brushed once as they were walking together down the tunnel, and Kent felt like Mr. fucking Darcy when Augustin took a half step to the right and put some space between them.

It’s different than it is with Jack from the very beginning. Augustin doesn’t flinch when Kent touches him in the locker room, even leans into it from time to time. He still jabs lightly at everything from the way Kent tapes his stick to the way he folds his clothes. They still watch game tapes on the couch together, pointing out the flaws in their plays, except they’re both under the same blanket, legs tangled together underneath woolen knit. It feels safe. It feels deceptively easy.

He waits for the other shoe to drop, but a week passes, then two, and nothing happens.

No one suspects anything, because Allie and Frisk are about a million times closer than they could ever be, except maybe Jeff. Jeff watches them with a small smile on his face, and when Kent is two drinks in after they beat the Red Wings, he claps a hand on the back of Kent’s neck and shakes him gently.

“Something about them, eh?” He says, and Kent can’t help but laugh.

“It’s the language of love,” he jokes, and it’s the closest he’s ever come to saying anything out loud. Across the table, Augustin looks up from where he’s been arguing with Petal and Flicker about Star Wars, and pulls a face.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

Jeff just laughs. Kent feels an ankle knock against his own under the table, warm and steady.

He says later that night, as they lay together on the couch with his head tucked under Augustin’s chin, still slightly tipsy: “I think Swoops might know.”

Augustin’s fingers still where they’d been tracing abstract patterns on his shoulder, but they don’t retreat. “Does he know about you?”

“I think so. I can tell him he’s wrong, if you want.”

Augustin’s silent for a few tense moments before his shoulders relax and Kent stops hearing his pulse racing from the ear close to his chest. They’re chest to back on the couch, both in hoodies, Kent with his hood up nestled between Augustin’s legs with his head lolling on Augustin’s shoulder.

Augustin sighs, “I mean, the way he and Angie are going, he’s going to find out about me eventually. Just don’t…tell him outright, ça va?”

“Man, I can’t believe your sister is dating him,” Kent snorts, toying with one of his hoodie strings. “Like, voluntarily. I love him, but man…what a weird combination.”

“Ah, well, we Berengers tend to settle once we’re closer to thirty than twenty,” Augustin replies, and wheezes when Kent jabs an elbow into his gut.

“Maybe Angelique is, but you’re hitting above your weight, buddy.”

“Careful, or I’ll tell everyone you’re a bottle blond.”

So nothing changes much, other than that, except for one other thing. The one thing about the whole thing that changes is that their hockey goes from great to electric.

Kent doesn’t think he changes much, but Augustin looks as if he’s been doused in kerosene and lit on fire. He scores and skates and plays like he’s burning alive, and Kent can only watch, mesmerized, by the heat and glow. He can’t help but think about what a treat the audience is getting. How can you watch him play, and not walk away dazed and thinking that this is the greatest sport of all time?

They go on an utter rampage that’s only interrupted twice by an overtime loss to the Canucks and a regulation loss to Dallas, but even that doesn’t dampen Augustin’s newfound edge.

“He SCORES. A beautiful one-timer from Parson off the pass by Berenger, and the Aces are firmly in the divisional standings as they take the win over the Kings! What a fantastic streak of games by the Aces’ first line, two of whom are season points leaders.”

They’re slowly closing in on seventy points each. Every game, when the puck hits the back of the net while their skates are on the ice, Augustin turns to grin at him with his canine teeth on full display, mouthing the number they each have left to go.

It doesn’t matter how hard he tries: they play like gentlemen, and they win like gentlemen, and so neither of them gets more than one point away from the other.

Eight and eight. Seven and six. Five and six. Four and four.

It’s the middle of February when they play what could be the crucial game, an away game against Colorado. They walk into Ball Arena with sixty-seven points each, and Kent can feel something hot under his skin, like live wires running red. He tapes his sticks as normal, puts his headphones over his ears and goes for a walk around the tunnels, head bobbing to his pre-game album.

Around the corner, hands seize him by the sleeve, and tug him into a pitch dark room. This has become normal, too.

“I didn’t know there was a fucking succubus in the basement of Ball Arena,” he whispers, a familiar hand brushing up the line of his spine and bending his hips closer. In the thin shaft of light from the slightly open door, Augustin grins toothily, a single eye glinting amber.

“Constant vigilance, Parson. Turn off Celine Dion.”

“She’s your national hero.”

“Which is why I’m not defiling her artistry when I defile-”

A wooden shelf digs into his back as he buries one hand in Augustin’s hair, pressed bodily against the wall of what must be a janitor’s closet based on the sharp smell of bleach. He has to bite down on any noises to keep them contained, worrying a gash into his bottom lip. Augustin’s elegant fingers are always cold, except for when they’re sneaking under his shirt and spreading across his lower back.

“I thought we were going to be gentlemen,” he pants as Augustin nips at his neck, “What the fuck is this?”

“What do you mean?” Augustin asks innocently, drawing back. Kent rolls his eyes. Even in the darkness, he can hear the smirk.

“You’re trying to distract me.”

The weight and heat of Augustin disappears as if it was never there, and Kent nearly falls over. He has to catch himself on the edge of a shelf, and when he looks up, Augustin simply pops his eyebrows up once before jamming a snapback onto his head and strolling out of the room without a backwards glance.

Kent has to wait ten minutes for his body to calm down before he can leave too. By the time he gets back to the dressing room, Augustin’s already half-dressed with his hair pulled back, lining his eyes in the mirror. He smirks at Kent’s glower in the reflection, as if this is all just a fun little game, and yeah, this isn’t like Jack at all.

They leave Denver that night with a loss, Kent at sixty-nine points and Augustin without a goal at sixty-eight. It’s not entirely their fault: Scraps had a few bad bounces, and Smitty had an unfortunate turnover in the neutral zone that nobody saw coming. It’s just a sobering reminder that they’re not invincible.

“It’s their fucking backcheck,” Augustin mutters, scrolling through his spreadsheets. Across the aisle, Cross puts on his headphones with an annoyed expression, as if he’s going to get a substantial nap in the two hour flight back to Vegas. “They’re so fucking good at backchecking.”

“Augustin?” Kent says, because people are starting to glare at them.

“Yeah.”

“Pay attention to me.”

Augustin ignores him, so Kent shuts the laptop with a hand and leans up to whisper, “So the bet is coming home. You know, I’m starting to think about what I want as my, uh…winnings.”

The truth is, he’s been thinking about it for a lot longer than the two and a half weeks they’ve been doing this. Augustin’s entire demeanor changes as he slides his glasses off of his nose and swings his head around to look at Kent.

“You haven’t won yet,” he says, voice velvety and accent thick over the words. Kent feels a shiver crawl up his spine.

“No,” he says, “But I will.”

“Don’t be so sure. You couldn’t put it away tonight. Sixty-nine,” Augustin replies, lowering his voice as he whispers in Kent’s ear, “What, are you suddenly having trouble finishing, cher?”

“Maybe I just like the number,” Kent replies, hand drifting farther up Augustin’s thigh under the tray table before he removes it abruptly. He tries not to feel superior about how Augustin has to sit in discomfort for a lot longer than he did before the game. It takes the sting out of losing just barely.

He’s learning things about Augustin that he already knows, in strange new ways. Augustin sleeps like he’s dead, and Kent knows this because when he cards his fingers through dark hair, Augustin doesn’t move or make a sound. Augustin doesn’t like to be startled, but he can hear Kent coming before Kent wraps his arms around his waist and presses a kiss to the nape of his neck as he cooks breakfast. He gets pissy when they lose, and cocky when they win, and it translates to what they do after games.

He calls Beth while Augustin is in the shower the next morning.

“Hey dipwad,” she picks up, voice garbled by what he presumes is a mouthful of food. “Nice loss last night, I almost broke the common room TV.”

“Uh, okay, don’t do that,” he says, “So, listen. You know how I’m coming to Newark for that game next week?”

“Yeah, thanks again for the suite, by the way. I’m literally everyone’s favourite person right now.”

“Well, you need all the help you can get.”

“Hey, fuck you,” she says playfully, “I’ll have you know I’m the light of everyone’s life with or without my rich brother’s help.”

“Listen,” he says again, gut swirling nervously as he watches the bathroom door for any signs of it opening. The water is still running loudly, but he lowers his voice anyway, “I, uh…this might not happen, since I, uh…I’m not sure I can make it happen, that is-”

“Kenneth, are you having a fucking stroke?”

“If I can get him out of practice, are you cool with Augustin coming to brunch with us?”

Beth is silent for just long enough that Kent starts to worry that she’s passed out before she says, in a tightly restrained voice, “Oh. My God.”

“Elisabeth-”

“Oh my God!” his eardrum nearly bursts at the decibel level, “Oh my God, Mom fucking called it! Dude, are you kidding me? Are you two actually dating?”

“We’re not dating,” Kent says hastily, “We’re in a, uh…one month free trial, or something.”

Four months, but who’s counting other than him and Augustin?

“Dude, you don’t even know how fucking lucky you are,” Beth is saying, mad cackles interrupting every few words, “He is, like, on every other girl’s celebrity crush list. He’s so hot.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that,” Kent says dryly, “And as much as I would like to tell your teenage friends to eat their hearts out, you seem to have missed the part where I said that we’re not dating.”

“Yet,” Beth says excitedly.

Augustin’s words seem to have imprinted themselves on his bones: you’re not eighteen anymore. I’m already all in.

His mouth moves for a couple moments before he weakly says, “Yeah. Yet.”

“I can’t believe I’m going to have Angelique Berenger as a sister-in-law,” Beth swoons, “She’s so cool, she’s, like, a fashion icon-”

“Can you reel it in by like, a thousand percent please?”

“Okay, one more question,” Beth says, “Is he good at sex? He kinda seems like he would be. He seems like he has that vibe.”

“Oh my God, Beth,” Kent says, voice strangling in his throat, “You know what? If it ends up happening, you can ask him yourself. And by it, I mean brunch.”

“Because the sex has already happened,” Beth surmises, voice gloating, “Ohh, Mom’s gonna give you such a queer-inclusive sex education book when you get back home-”

He hangs up on her just as Augustin opens the door and the smell of eucalyptus billows out along with enough steam to boil a crab. He has a towel slung low over his hips, water still glistening on his skin, and Kent says, “You know that I also have shampoo, right?”

“You use two-in-one,” Augustin replies, “That shit is never touching my hair.”

“You know,” Kent repeats, standing and hooking a finger on the edge of the towel, “You seem very heterosexual until you start talking about shampoo brands.”

“And your reductive stereotyping won’t get you any closer to taking this off of me,” Augustin snipes back, seizing the towel tightly and walking away before Kent can untuck it, “I wasn’t fucking heterosexual last night, and neither were you!”

Kent says hotly at the retreating back, “You were fucking something, alright!”

“Yeah I was!”

He walked right into that one, but he steals Augustin’s Memorial Cup T-shirt in retribution anyways. Augustin makes turkey sausage and eggs for breakfast, and Kent forgets to ask him about brunch next week as they eat brunch today, across from each other at the kitchen island with a cup of orange juice they swap back and forth because there was only enough left for one glass.

And hey, Kent thinks maybe he could get used to this.

---

Here’s the thing about hockey; it’s ravenous, more ravenous than its players who cram down more protein in a week than a medieval peasant saw in a year. It eats everything: the weakest parts of the body, the sweat, the tears and blood. It eats time and energy, love and desire and anger, and it becomes whatever you feed it, but you lose whatever you give it. That’s the deal.

Kent Parson loves winning, and he hates losing, and so he feeds the game everything, his passion and his desire, and in doing so, he often loses his restraints. He becomes the goals, his heart follows the puck into the net, and in search of that fire, he forgets how to be a human being. He burns away the constraints of polite society, and he becomes hockey. The rules of hockey are simple. Someone wins, so someone else loses.

Is it really any wonder that all his relationships turn out the way that they do?

---

The day of their game against Calgary begins like all other days.

“We’re going to be late,” Augustin mutters from the passenger seat of the car, sipping his traveler’s mug of coffee. The air, circulated through the car’s ventilation system, recycles the tension humming between them that even a round last night and a round this morning couldn’t dissipate. This is seventy points on the line, but it’s more than that; it’s victory.

“Who’s fault is that?” Kent replies, knowing full well that it’s his. But he’s capable of being distracting too.

They’ve entered a strange zone for this game that everyone else can sense, like a tether between their ribs that people keep walking into. Swoops looks at them funny, like he’s torn between wiggling his eyebrows and cautioning them as a good alternate captain should.

Smitty thinks he got laid, “Fucking eh, Cap! What TV show is she on this time?”

Kent doesn’t correct him on the specifics.

The ice is perfectly glazed when he skates out for the warm-up. The blades leave crisp lines as he gives his sharpened edges a test, and flings a few practice shots at Scraps. The air is cold, and when he exhales, he can imagine that this is the shinny pond again.

As they wait for the first period to begin, Augustin comes up behind him and says in his ear, “May the best man win.”

“He will,” Kent replies. Augustin shoves his helmet down over his face so his visor is nearly at his chin.

Two and one. That’s all that’s left.

The first period comes fast and hard. The Flames have had a nice little break due to a scheduling hiccup, and they’re dancing on the edge of a wild-card spot that the Aces have just vacated for them, so they have all the more reason to go for it. They’re big, and they hit, and Augustin gets a penalty for shoving someone a little too hard after the whistle.

“Fuck!” Kent hears across the ice from the penalty box, and stifles a snicker despite his annoyance. For all his plans and careful calculations, Augustin’s vice is leaping at the chance to get a little jab in, just to see if he can.

The Flames don’t score on the penalty kill. Augustin slumps back to the bench silent and arrow-focused, and for a moment, Kent worries that he might not be able to get a goal fast enough.

His worry increases when, on a late change, Augustin beats three forwards, two defenders, and a goalie. Kent’s just stepping onto the ice when the puck hits the back of the net and the buzzer lights up red and white, screaming in his ear.

“A beautiful play by Augustin Berenger, who goes end to end for an unassisted goal, and the Aces are up by one late in the first.”

They have to finish the shift, and as the ice-cleaners scrape the snow into piles to put in buckets, Augustin drifts towards him spinning his stick in his hands. His chest is still heaving. Kent watches a bead of sweat drip from below his helmet’s brim and trace down to his neck guard.

“All tied up,” he grins, every single one of his teeth on full display. “Next goal wins.”

And is there ever anything better to say to a hockey player than next goal wins?

They play some of the best hockey of Kent’s life, but only for a minute at a time, and the Flames sneak in a goal early in the third that carries the game to overtime, after sixty minutes of regulation where neither of them can get one leg up over the other. There’s something poetic about that.

They sit next to each other in silence as Coach Wilson gives them a rousing speech, Augustin’s left foot bouncing restlessly as the ten minutes of ice-cleaning slowly tick away. Someone’s going to win, and someone’s going to lose, and neither of them are particularly good at losing.

They start at the face off dot, and Kent mouths off at the other center until the puck drops. He wings the puck back to Frisk, who dumps it into the opposing end and forces the Flames into their own zone.

“The Aces close in on the Flames, Smith digging it out of the corner to Berenger. Berenger to Frisk, Frisk to Ahlgren, Ahlgren shoots from the blue line, rebound off of- Parson SCORES! An overtime goal for Kent Parson to bring him to seventy points, the top of the NHL leaderboard, and the Aces take the game forty-three seconds into overtime!”

It’s almost like fate. The puck bobbles out of the goalie’s glove and hits the ice, and Kent’s just there to put it in the back of the net, a neat little present sent for delivery. A scream escapes his mouth as his back hits the boards, the fans pounding the glass by his ear as Smitty barrels into him.

They both know that Augustin could have shot the puck from an angle, but he didn’t, because he knew only a miracle of gross incompetence on the part of the goalie would put it in. He picked the better play. He lost with dignity, and as he skates into the celebratory circle, he’s smiling.

“What a garbage goal,” he says, and Kent hasn’t been this happy since he lifted the Stanley Cup.

He gets the game’s first star, and the team top hat for most effective player. Augustin is the one who hands it to him.

“Congratulations, captain,” he says, and when their fingers brush under the brim, Augustin’s glide purposefully over his knuckles. “You earned it.”

---

In his first game with the Aces, he doesn’t even think about the worn top hat sitting on top of Ethan Cross’ cubby.

Cross is the team’s best defenceman, twenty-four and signed from Philadelphia last year. Kent doesn’t like him: he’s dark-haired and cocky, and tries too hard to get Kent to join him and the rest of the younger players on nights out. He’s trying too hard to be Kent’s friend, and Kent doesn’t need it. The spot’s already full, even if it doesn’t look like it.

He scores two goals in his NHL debut and gets the first star of the game, but the hat goes to Vittorio Scarpello for his first career shutout. Kent doesn’t care. It’s a fucking cheap plastic hat.

It’s their first away game when the hat makes its way to him. He takes it from Cross, who got it again in the interim game, and barely smiles when the room claps for him. He tosses the hat carelessly onto the top of his cubby, and forgets it there when he leaves the room early to call a number that he doesn’t yet know has him blocked.

Leo Sturgeon is the captain of the Aces in all but name. Everyone calls him Fish, because his dad is a fisherman and sends him a crate of fresh Pacific salmon on ice every year on his birthday. He sits next to Kent on the bus back to the airport, and hands him the top hat.

“You forgot this.”

“Sorry,” Kent mutters, taking the worn, plasticky felt and plopping it on his lap carelessly. He’s too busy trying to draft another text to Jack. Bob let him know that Jack was being checked into rehab, and he wants to make sure he has everything he needs.

“Parser, can I say something?”

“Yeah man,” he doesn’t look up until Fish steals the phone from his hand, “What the fuck? Give that back!”

“Kent,” Fish says seriously, laying the phone facedown on his lap, “You’re a phenomenal player, and a good kid, but sometimes, you’re a fucking knobhead.”

Kent feels himself shrink, which at five-foot-nine, he can’t afford to do, “What?”

“Look. You’re gonna get this hat a hell of a lot more in your career than you’re going to get Cups, or trophies,” Fish says, patting the hat with a hollow sound like a cheap drum, “And, I mean, it’s from the dollar store. When the first Aces were selected in the expansion draft, they all went shopping together. Shetty picked it up along with a soap dispenser. His wife made him return the dispenser, but he kept the hat.”

Kent lives with Shetty and his wife, and likes them both, which is why he starts listening. With the benefit of hindsight, he probably should’ve started listening a lot sooner.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you, but this hat? It’s the most important thing you’ll ever get in your career.” Fish says seriously, “You earn the Cup by winning, you earn trophies from people who don’t know you. But you earn this hat from your teammates, win or lose, because they see you for who you are. Do you get it, kid?”

Kent looks down at the benign black top hat sitting in his lap, and feels sick about ever leaving it around like it’s nothing. It’s almost everything. “Yeah, man. I get it.”

The next year, Fish snaps his ACL in the pre-season and it never heals properly. Kent visits him in the hospital a couple days after his third surgery, where his eyes are bloodshot and red from crying, and plops the top hat on his head. Fish’s girlfriend cries when she tells Kent that that’s the first time Fish has smiled in weeks.

Fish never plays in the NHL again. Kent takes Shetty and Cross and the new guy, Jeff Troy, with him to the dollar store to buy a new cheap top hat for the team. He lets Fish keep the one that matters.

The year after that, they make him the captain of the Las Vegas Aces.

---

The drive home is hot and stifled. Augustin drives, having stolen the keys from Kent’s pants pocket while he was doing a post-game interview, and his eyes never leave the road.

“So,” Kent starts when they hit a red, and Augustin just turns the music up louder, a small smile playing across his face. He wants Kent to sweat. “You’re such a fuckhead.”

Augustin just pats his knee once, and hits the gas on green hard enough that Kent smacks his head against the headrest.

It’s not just that winning is a hell of an aphrodisiac. It’s the same feeling as getting to the end of a roadtrip after twenty hours in the car, or standing at the peak of a mountain he’s just climbed. It’s the culmination of months worth of biting chirps and perfect goals and insane, absurd chemistry. It’s euphoria, plain and simple.

All this to say that Kent’s twenty-four years old, but right now, he’s the equivalent of a hormonal sixteen year old, and if the elevator door doesn’t open in the next three seconds, he’s just gonna start unbuttoning things right here. Augustin’s trying to torture him too, taking his blazer off as the floor numbers tick up and folding it over his forearm neatly.

“Hot in here, eh?”

“Oh my God,” Kent mutters under his breath. His pants are so tight that they’re verging on painful, “Oh my God.”

He’s about ready to jump Augustin against the door, but it appears that Augustin’s not losing as gracefully as he thought.

“Are you hungry?” he asks pleasantly once they’ve entered the apartment, dropping the keys in the dish and kicking his shoes off nonchalantly. Kent tries to grab him, but he’s already walking away, putting the kitchen island between the two of them as he opens the fridge and sticks his head inside, knowing damn well that there’s nothing in that fucking fridge.

He feels his eyebrow twitch, “Augustin, I’m going to kill you.”

Augustin frowns as he closes the fridge and braces his hands on the edge of the island. “Why?”

Kent’s face must be as wound up as he feels right now, because Augustin’s composure breaks, and he laughs, eyes dark and huge in the dim orange lamplight. “Oh, I see.”

“Will you get over here?” The desperation in his voice is a tactical error. He’s the winner here, not Augustin, and yet he’s the one asking for things.

“Make me,” Augustin replies with a grin. Kent takes a step to one side and Augustin takes one to the other, keeping the island between them.

“Are you fucking five?”

“Don’t hate the player, Parson,” Augustin says breathlessly, looping around to the other edge of the island when Kent takes three steps the other way, “Hate the game.”

Kent rounds the island and Augustin makes a break for it, but can’t get to the door of the guest room before Kent’s pulling it shut, and only makes it three steps towards the other end of the apartment before Kent tackles him over the edge of the couch.

“Agh, putain!”

They tussle on the cushions until he pins Augustin by the hips, and grins victoriously, “And I win again. It’s not a good day for you.”

Augustin tries to throw him off, but Kent won’t budge, “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. You just got lucky.”

“Don’t be a sore loser,” he hums, leaning down. “Come on. Be nice.”

Augustin bites him, which isn’t very nice.

“Ow!”

Augustin surges up to kiss him while he’s off-balance, and suddenly Kent’s on his back, six feet of dark-haired French-Canadian hovering over him with a knee pressed between his legs. Except this time, he’s sure it’s going to be okay.

“Is that what you want?” Augustin asks when he draws back in time to give Kent a moment to breathe through his light-headedness. “Seventy points and all you want is for me to be nice?”

“No,” his voice comes out rough as he slides a hand under Augustin’s belt to pull his collared shirt out, pressing fingers to the muscles of his back underneath, “I want something else.”

“Yeah?” Augustin asks, a livewire glowing in his brown eyes. He’s got a devilish smile on his face. Kent’s on the brink of losing his sanity.

Augustin ducks his head in to kiss him again, for so long that Kent thinks he might be dead before he can say what he wants, which may all be part of Augustin’s plan anyways. But Augustin draws back eventually, and whispers in his ear, “Alright, Kent. Tell me what you want.”

His hands are roving around under Kent’s shirt, and for a moment, he almost wants to fall back into the allure of the game, and play it, and win again. But he’s got a bigger game in mind, a longer one. One that spans the rest of his career.

It starts when he says through ragged breaths, “I want you to delete your trade spreadsheet.”

---

When Kent Parson is seven years old, his dad is diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, which his mother shortens to ‘cancer’ for the benefit of her son. He didn’t smoke, but he worked construction, and maybe it’s decades of fumes that did it, or the smog of New York City, or the black mold in the corner of their apartment, but either way, he’s dead six months later.

He wasn’t even forty yet.

At the time, Kent was playing his third year of hockey, and he was better than most of the nine and ten year olds. They bumped him up an age category, because for a very limited span of time, he was tall for his age. His coach drove him to and from practices and games while his mom was at the hospital with the dying love of her life. Kent wore the worn hand-me-down gear and held the old-fashioned wooden stick of his daughter, who was two years older than Kent.

“I wish my dad was here,” he says grumpily from the backseat after they win the Atom championship banner. Coach Henry looks at the golden-haired kid who bleeds potential sulking in the rearview mirror, and doesn’t say anything. He’s not paid enough.

All his dad’s golden hair falls out, and it scares him. Little baby Beth cries at night with only Kent’s arthritic grandma to hold her, and Kent sleeps on the floor next to her crib when Grandma goes to bed.

His dad dies during the off-season, a month before Kent turns eight, and his life-insurance policy is worth sixty-thousand dollars.

It’s more money than they’ve ever had in their lives at once. They spend most of it paying off the medical bills, and the last three-hundred dollars are used to buy Kent his first real set of hockey gear. By the time he’s nine years old, he’s grown out of all of it, except for the neck guard and the gloves.

But to him, that’s what love is. His father’s entire life was boiled down to a few thousand dollars, and his mother used it to give her son a chance at a future. Love is pragmatic, it’s scraping up the parts of himself that he can spare and giving them over to someone else. Even if, in the end, they end up not using it, at least he can say that he tried.

---

“What?” Augustin breathes against his neck, mouthing along one of the cords. Kent folds a hand through dark curls that smell of eucalyptus, and struggles to reiterate himself. Augustin’s body is a weight on his hips that he arches up against, until he can barely think, let alone speak.

“I said-”

Augustin’s hands go still, a delayed response as he draws back abruptly, “What?”

Kent’s stomach curdles at the tone of his voice. He expected anger, annoyance, something harsh and biting so that he could get all self-righteous and they could have a nice verbal sparring match that preferably ended with Kent smashing Augustin’s laptop into a million little pieces with a rubber mallet and possibly some angry makeup and/or victory sex.

Instead, Augustin looks terrified.

The room is suddenly very, very cold, and so are Augustin’s frozen hands on his skin.

“Gus,” Kent starts, and Augustin vaults away like he’s been burned.

Dread pools in the bottom of his stomach as he watches Augustin pace back and forth, hand scrubbing over his mouth and through his hair as he walks a ditch into the floor. He doesn’t say anything, terrified of driving yet another beautiful, dark-haired boy off the brink. It’s a familiar picture.

“Fucking say it again,” Augustin finally says, voice deathly quiet. Kent feels a lump swelling in his throat. He has to swallow it three times before any words can escape on either side of it.

“You have a spreadsheet where you track your potential trades. I want you to get rid of it.”

Augustin closes his eyes. Breathes in. Breathes out, “How the fuck do you know about that?”

See, Kent was all prepared for Augustin to blow his lid about having his privacy violated, and he had a few good jabs wrapped in apologies about caring and wanting the best for him that he can now see were a bigger tactical error than anything he’s ever fucking done since Juniors. So he doesn’t know what the fuck to say as Augustin hides his terror behind deep, blistering anger.

It’s becoming a remarkable niche skill of his, destroying things, a practiced skill whose effectiveness is shared only by wrecking balls and nuclear warheads.

“The first time you showed me your spreadsheets, on the plane,” he says calmly, because he sure as hell doesn’t feel calm but Augustin is really in no condition to tell, so he might as well pretend that someone is, “It popped up while you were in the bathroom.”

“Popped up?"

“I hit it by accident,” Kent clarifies, standing so that Augustin isn’t towering over him. His tongue is half-petrified as he reaches out, “Look, Gus-”

“Do not fucking touch me,” Augustin spits, backing away like a feral dog, “Don’t fucking touch me, don’t-” He laughs humourlessly, “That was none of your fucking business.”

“I’m your-” captain. Your friend. I care. I like you. I lo- “Look, I’m sorry that I looked at it, but I’m worried about you.”

“No,” Augustin says tightly, eyebrows set low over his massive dark eyes, “No, don’t fucking give me that, because you’ve been sitting on this for fucking months. What were you waiting for? The first fight where I got the upper fucking hand? Keeping it up your sleeve waiting for the minute you thought I stepped a toe out of line-”

“Jesus, Augustin, you paranoid fuck-”

“Paranoid?” Augustin laughs lifelessly, a harsh burst of sound, “Paranoid. I’m fucking prepared, Parson. I don’t just barrel through life with my eyes closed, knocking everybody over and hoping I didn’t break anything as I race from one end to the other. That’s your fucking job.”

---

The first time that Kent plays Augustin Berenger, it’s in his second game in the Q. He’s fifteen years old, and he thinks: wow.

Augustin Berenger is already halfway to famous, even though he’s only sixteen. He’s got half the D1 schools clawing at his door, Rouyn-Noranda are the favourites to win the Memorial Cup this year, and Kent isn’t used to someone being as fast as he is. He isn’t used to losing races, and he’s not used to losing at all.

They’re losing 3-1.

Berenger’s also much bigger than him, and slams him into the boards just before the whistle late in the second period. Kent stumbles away and wheels to yell at him.

“I’m going to fucking get you, fuckhead!”

Berenger doesn’t even look at him. He looks over Kent’s head at Jack, whose name is broadcast to the rafters on the back of his jersey, and calmly says, “Oy, Zimmermann! C'est bien que ton père t'ait acheté un ami, mais soyez un bon garçon et mettez votre chien en laisse.”

The referees have to escort Jack away by the jersey as he yells in French at the smiling kid leaning calmly against the goalpost. Berenger scores three minutes later, putting Rimouski down by three goals just before the second period ends, and waves cheekily at Jack afterwards.

In the late middle of the third period, Jack bitterly says, “I hate that guy.”

The next shift, Kent boards him so hard that Berenger doesn’t come back for the rest of the game, but at least Jack is smiling at him across the ice as he sits in the penalty box.

He doesn’t even think about how a slightly different angle would have ended up taking hockey away from Augustin forever.

But he's young still. He has time to grow out of it.

---

“I just don’t understand,” Kent tries to say, “You’re good, everyone likes you, it’s almost guaranteed that we’re going to try and re-sign you when this is over-”

Augustin shakes his head, “You don’t know that.”

“-and yet you’re preparing as if the fucking nuclear apocalypse is about to commence, and that spreadsheet is your fucking bunker full of tin cans-”

“Fuck, Kent, we’re not all you!” Augustin spits, “We’re not all perfect right off the bat, we’re not all the best player in the world, no matter how much our dads and our coaches fucking told us we were when we were kids! You don’t know what it’s been like, you have no fucking idea-”

“Yes I do!” Kent shouts. “Maybe I didn’t fucking go through it, but don’t fucking say that I don’t know what happened with the fucking Aeros. I know.”

He registers what a massive fucking mistake it was to say that when Augustin goes as white as a ghost, and he realizes that Augustin wasn’t talking about the Aeros at all. Alluding to it, maybe, but never outright, not enough to justify his response. He’s been waiting to tell someone for ages, with it brimming on the tip of his tongue, and now the final drop has broken the surface tension holding it all in place.

And he’s not even supposed to fucking know.

“Oh?” Augustin’s voice is very carefully controlled as he crosses his arms tightly, “And what do you think that you know?”

Kent’s not very good with his words when it matters. Sure, he’s great with your rousing speeches and your cheesy PR answers, but none of that is any more real than the lipstick they put on pigs. When it comes to what’s real, he falters. He stumbles. He says things that he doesn’t mean the way they sound, like “You think you’re too fucked up to care about? Everybody already knows what you are, but it’s people like me who still care.”

He says things like: “I know that Tim Goldman beat you half-to-death in your rookie year, and you’ve been terrified ever since-”

A hand fists in the collar of his shirt, a brutal, loveless mirror of the last time Augustin grabbed him like this, “Who told you?”

“Kirby,” he says quietly. He doesn’t mention Angelique or Snowy, because he doesn’t want to break Augustin more than he’s already fracturing apart.

Augustin nods once, slowly, releasing Kent one finger at a time. His voice is deadly when he speaks again, a sharp, angry smile bleeding across his mouth, really less of a smile and more like a knife has slit open his face, “Is this a fucking thing? All you captains get together, you shoot the shit, you laugh about all the fucking idiots on your team and their fucked up careers? Is that it? Huh? How long was I a fucking joke to you?”

In his entire life, he has never heard Augustin scream like that. He’s heard shouts of victory, biting jabs and chirps called across the ice as both a teammate and an adversary, and belligerent hollers, but never anything as raw and guttural as this. It’s barely even human.

“No,” Kent can feel his back foot teetering on the edge of a cliff, words scrambling to keep him firmly rooted, “that’s not-”

“Did you and Kirby hang out at his wedding talking about the time he broke my finger during practice by taking a slapshot at my hand because Goldman thought I was being mouthy? Did you laugh together about how Tyler Hannity was traded with me to the Rangers and told everyone I fucked the owner’s wife? Was it fun for you, talking about that arrogant fucking pathetic princess Augustin Berenger, who can’t stay on a team to save his life because no one fucking wants him?”

“I fucking want you!”

“No,” Augustin sneers, “You want to save me. You want to redeem yourself out of your own mental fucking hellscape, and you think you can pawn off all of your Jack Zimmermann related guilt onto lifting me out of whatever hell you think I’m suffering from. Well, you know what, Parson? I am not your fucking pet project, I do not need you to fucking save me. Jack seems to be doing just fucking fine without you, and I am doing just fucking fine on my own, too.”

Kent is a kid who grew up fighting for what he wanted. If he just stood there and took it, took what life and the kids at his school threw at him, one day they’d scrape and tear enough from him that he’d have nothing left. Fighting back is a self-preservation instinct under the worst of circumstances; it means that if he loses anything more, there won’t be enough left of him to recover. He gives, but he can’t let them take.

That’s why he says things like: ”You’re worried everyone else is going to find out you’re worthless, right? Oh, don’t worry. Give it a few seasons.”

That’s why he says, “You’re doing fine? You couldn’t even break a fucking sixty point season without me. You see a sports therapist because you almost beat Kirby half to death, but hey, that’s the Aeros way, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?”

---

How does he come back from being Kent Parson, saying the things he says while meaning the things he means? How does he recover from this? Because he’s not eighteen anymore, and Augustin’s sober and standing right in front of him, and there’s no more excuses to be made. There’s nothing to be done, other than what’s already happened.

Once is a mistake. Twice is a pattern.

So now he has to reckon with the fact that he might actually just be this way.

---

Augustin stares at him for a moment before he gruffly says, “Okay.”

He turns on his heel and strides into his bedroom. Kent feels as though he’s walked into a nightmare he can’t wake up from, a terrible dream like his recurring terrors about a college dorm room plastered with Samwell paraphernalia.

“Augustin, this is fucking ridiculous,” he follows Augustin into the room, something curdling in his stomach as he watches Augustin haphazardly throw his things into his suitcase, shoving them in willy-nilly. The old Habs T-shirt, his Rouyn-Noranda hoodie, his leather jacket, all disappearing into the gaping leather maw. “Stop it!”

Augustin zips up the suitcase and his leather messenger bag, hauling them out of the room without a word. His face is a plastic, emotionless mask as he shoulders past Kent and opens the apartment door.

“Augustin,” Kent says, and his voice is angrier than he wants it to be. He wants it to be pleading, and apologetic, and yet it’s all bite and sharpened edge, like an angry, abusive husband, “Don’t walk out that door.”

Augustin pauses at the threshold, and Kent blissfully thinks that he’ll come back inside, and they can sit down and talk about this like reasonable people. He can explain, Augustin can yell at him some more, and tomorrow morning they will go on a run and have breakfast together, and maybe they’ll never kiss again or share anything worth having but at least Kent will have something. At least he’ll have good hockey.

Instead, all Augustin says is: “I fucking trusted you. My fucking mistake.”

The sound of the door shutting behind him shakes apart Kent’s bones.

---

The other shoe drops.

Notes:

today's spotify daylists were tragic writer morning and soul-crushing situationship afternoon so like. do with that what you will

also i was writing a research proposal today and i'm so deep in the pits that every time i wanted to write August i would automatically write augustin and then have to constantly backspace. someone save me this is actually concerning.

Chapter 16

Summary:

in which Augustin doesn't know what to do

Augustin spends that first night in a hotel bathtub.

He sleeps inside of it, still in his game suit, knees bunched to his chest and shoulders cramped by the white plastic tub. When he wakes up around six in the morning, his whole body hurts.

It’s nice to have the distraction.

There are five missed calls from Kent, and one missed call from his sister. He throws his phone in the nightstand drawer, strips down to his boxers, and crawls under the bedcovers. He doesn’t sleep, just lies there feeling the fibres under his cheek and the pressed sheets against his bare skin.

Every time. Every fucking time.

It’s his fault, for expecting more from this sport and the people that play it, who wash him around their mouths and spit him out every chance they get. He keeps throwing himself into the sea and wondering naively why it dashes him against the sharp, jagged rocks.

He thinks of Kent Parson, the glory that weeps from him, and dully figures that he should have always known it would end up this way. Angels always want to save something.

Augustin never wanted to be saved. He just wanted to put his head down and play eighty-two games per year and whatever extra they’ll permit him for as long as his knees still bend and his wrists still twist. Is that too much to fucking ask? Or is he doomed to jump headfirst no matter what he does, because at the end of the day, there’s no way to survive cutting his heart out of his chest completely. For as long as it beats, he’s alive, but he’s doomed.

His mother used to say he took things too seriously. They didn’t have cable for most of his childhood, so he would use the money he earned shoveling snow and working for the Patenaudes in the summer to order DVDs in the mail. A good film would affect the way he talked, the way he acted, the way that he thought. He cried so often over them that his head would hurt for hours afterwards, and he only ever cried more when his hockey team lost.

“You feel too much,” his mother said once, while petting his hair, “A movie shouldn’t make you cry like this, August. Life is much harder than what you see on the screen. It’s going to chew you up and spit you out. You can’t cry at that either.”

The older he gets, the more he thinks that she’s been right all along.

He doesn’t cry. He lies in bed swaddled in white linen because it feels as if he has no skin. The things that Kent knows have slowly flayed him alive, ripping off his outer layers in strips until cold, harsh air hits his exposed muscle and bone.

Anyone else, Smitty or Troy or Cross, he thinks he could’ve survived intact. He’ll find a way to survive this too, but he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that he’s not walking a very fine edge.

There’s no game today, only an optional skate, so he lies on the bed and tries not to think. Eventually, he sleeps, and when he wakes up early the next morning, so early that it’s practically still late, there are no more missed calls than there were twenty-four hours prior.

He leases a car the morning after he moves out, a sensible electric sedan that he hopes nobody will notice as he drives it into the parking lot an hour earlier than everyone expects them to be there, except that Troy is sitting in his Range Rover when he arrives.

“Hey, new car?” He asks as Augustin gets out and locks the car, leaning out his window with a dopey smile. “Where the hell are you parking it? Parse finally manage to snag a second parking spot?”

“I don’t live with Parson anymore,” Augustin says, walking by without another word.

“What?” He hears Jeff say incredulously as he rounds the corner, and the echoing sound of a call connecting through a car’s speaker system is the last thing he hears when the garage door shuts behind him.

When Kent finally arrives for their practice, he tries to approach Augustin in the dressing room, looking sallow and haggard, as if he hasn’t been sleeping well. Augustin turns on his heel, and walks away. He hides in the storage closet of the medical room, because Kent knows he prefers the back corner of the equipment room and the bench behind the mountain of ice in the zamboni tunnel. Nobody finds him sitting on a bin of first-aid supplies tying his skates, just like his sister used to have to do when she was a kid. He’s the first one on the ice.

Practice is fine, because Augustin has long since learned how to skate away during practice. It’s easier than last time. The other Aces have done nothing and know nothing, so he only has to dodge one person instead of twenty-four, and Wilson is so strict that the opportunity to stand around and chat is practically non-existent anyways.

His familiarity with Kent’s play is both a blessing and a curse. It means he can get away without uttering a word, but when the puck is moving and his legs are pumping, and Kent is at his most beautiful, he can’t afford to look away.

He told himself once that if he had to choose between love, hockey, or neither, he would choose hockey. He holds himself to it, and he forces himself to look.

He’s the first one out of the dressing room too. For the rest of the day, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Somehow, he’s forgotten how to be alone, and now that the feeling is back, it’s crushing him. He ends up walking aimlessly around the UNLV campus in between their practice and his second-to-last mandated session with Dr. Tidey, which is getting him out of dryland training today.

Sometimes he wonders what life would be like if he had gone to any of the schools who had offered him admission: Princeton, Boston College, Samwell, Michigan State, Boston U. If he had gone to BC, would he and Chris be together? What would he have majored in? If he had gone to BU, would Angelique have decided to work and play somewhere else? Would he have been good at school? Would he have liked it? If he had gone to Samwell, would it be Jack Zimmermann that he played with, and defended, and cared about?

If he had done all four years, or even just two, the Aeros wouldn’t have drafted him. Even if they did, Goldman would be in Brooklyn by then.

He shakes his head and dumps his coffee cup in a trash can. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. This is the real world. In the real world, he goes to his appointment with Dr. Tidey and lies through his teeth between his mean jabs at Tidey’s impotent NFL career.

“I’m extending our sessions by one more,” Tidey says after they’re done, and Augustin groans like a spoiled teenager.

“Why?”

“Because you spent this whole session being more of a pissant than usual, but also because you didn’t say anything that matters. So you owe me another go. The receptionist will call you.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to do that.”

Tidey looks at him over his glasses, “Watch me. See you soon, Augustin.”

Augustin goes back to the hotel and orders unhealthy room service and watches the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. His sister calls again, and he doesn’t pick up.

Sometimes, he wonders what life would be like if he hadn’t said anything that night at the bar. If he had just kept his fucking mouth shut while the Aeros core ragged off everyone and everything that they thought stepped a toe out of line: journalists, pundits, girlfriends and old teammates. The fucking words they had used, the heinous things they said like they meant nothing…if he ignored them, maybe he’d be wearing the C in Houston like everyone said he would. Maybe he’d be the best player in the world, maybe he’d have hoisted the Cup in his second year in the league.

But if he hadn’t said anything that night while in a drunken stupor, his streak of internal justice making a dying last stand, he’s not stupid enough to believe that he wouldn’t have one day become just like Tim Goldman. He’s not sure what reality he’s scared of more: the one he’s living in, or the one he could have been.

He moves into a new apartment three days after he leaves Kent.

It’s a nice two-bedroom place near the university, on the third floor of an old, repurposed factory with massive bay windows and dark wooden floors. He picked this one because it was weird, with a strange arched alcove in the brick-walled living room and one bedroom painted dark green that Angelique will like if she comes over before the season ends and doesn’t stay in Troy’s massive house. It’s about as far from the modern chrome and steel of Kent’s apartment that he can get. He spends the first night sleeping on an air mattress on the floor, one he picked up from the local camping supply depot.

He wakes up wondering why there isn’t a cat licking his fingers as they dust the cold wooden floor, and for the fourth day in a row, everything hurts. It’s as though he’s been put through a meat grinder: pulsated, beaten, and shredded into a bloody, unrecognizable mulch. Every movement is a struggle. Every word is a trial. Sometimes, he’ll sit down or stop moving and realize that he doesn’t really remember the last few hours.

They lose their next game. And then the next one.

The games are close: a loss by one to the Jets, and a hard fought loss by two to the Capitals. They’re both the best teams in their respective divisions right now, and so losing to them doesn’t raise any suspicions. The Aces are tenth in the league, after all. But Augustin hates losing. He collects each one in his gut like a kidney stone, and each one makes it harder to go faster in the next game, and the game after that.

Neither of them are playing badly, but they’re not playing as well as they once were, and it shows. Kent’s too busy trying to fucking make it up to him by passing when he should be shooting, giving when he should be taking, and if Augustin could look him in the eye, he would scream, you fucking know better.

Smitty becomes an unknowing buffer. His points count bumps up as Augustin turns his energy to him instead, but he doesn’t seem happy with it.

“The divorce jokes were just jokes, you know,” he says during practice while Kent’s over with the alternates, making sure that Bloom, who’s mic’d up and currently shooting the shit with McCandles and Buckley, is nowhere near them, “What the fuck happened?”

“I fucking grew up,” Augustin mutters, “Got my own place. Your wrist shot is getting fucking sloppy. Get it the fuck together.”

“Yeah, okay,” Smitty says skeptically, “I’ll be the one to get it together.”

They leave on a roadie, and Augustin makes sure that he gets his own room this time around. That’s when the rest of the team really notices that something is wrong, when they slink upstairs to their floor after landing in Detroit and Kent walks into a different room from Augustin. The door shuts with an almighty slam.

Six different people text him about it, because hockey players are also competitive gossips, and he doesn’t answer any of them. Kent’s the captain. It’s his fucking problem.

Kent’s been playing as good as he always does, maybe even better except for the new penchant for ill-advised passes, but he looks like shit. Bags are starting to develop under his eyes, and everything he says is thorny and mean. In practices he’s critical of everyone and everything: bad passes, lazy shots, fooling around and playful jabs. The youngest players are cowed, and the players around his age are getting mutinous. Cross and the other veterans just exchange weary glances.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Kent’s going to destroy this team’s chances if Augustin doesn’t do something soon, if he doesn’t break his self-imposed exile. For a moment, as he watches Kent rip into Troy and Makela about their breakout strategy, he spitefully wonders what he could possibly owe to him.

But at the end of the day, Kent’s not the one playing worse than usual, and there’s twenty-three other Aces who want to win just as badly as they do.

Kent’s yelling at Smitty in the dressing room after practice, Troy struggling to get a word in edgewise, when Augustin grabs him by the collar of his compression shirt and yanks him around, “Enough. Take a fucking walk.”

It’s the first words he’s said to Kent in almost a week. Kent stares up at him, mouth twisted in a familiar sneer. For a moment, Augustin thinks they might actually start hitting each other this time, but then Kent storms off without protest, throwing his shoulder-pads into his bag and stalking out of the visitor’s room half-dressed and shiny with sweat.

Troy tries to say something to him, but Augustin ignores it. He just sits back down and undresses silently.

Here’s the thing: Augustin knows that Kent is, at his core, a good man. The cracks in Tim Goldman’s facade were visible early, and they were massive, but Augustin was young and he wanted a mentor, an older brother, someone to show him the way. Kent’s cracks are visible too, but they’re not seeping violence like poison. They just expose the fear writhing just below his skin.

The dog in the cage will bite the hand trying to free it. The rattlesnake doesn’t wait for you to step on it before it stops rattling and starts lunging. When people are scared, they lash out or they hide.

Augustin would know. He’s scared all the time.

Kent comes back and apologizes to Smitty, and apologizes to Troy and Cross, and doesn’t look at Augustin at all, even though he clearly wants to. That’s what makes him a good captain: he knows what hills to die on, and what pedestals to climb down from.

They lose to Detroit, and that’s when the press starts noticing that something is wrong.

Someone’s keeping the game press away from him, and he realizes pretty quickly that it’s Kent, who is consistently throwing himself and Troy under the bus against the latter’s will. He can hear them talking in the hallway during both intermissions, giving stock answers and defending themselves.

“We all just have to keep our feet on the gas,” Kent is saying, “It’s a team effort, we all have to do better. It's no one person's fault.”

He wants to bite and snap about not wanting charity, not wanting penance, but finds that his desire to be left alone overwhelms his desire to force people away.

So he lets Kent do this one thing for him, and tries to settle his stomach about it.

And yet, for some reason, he stops before they get on the bus. Kent is always the last one on; he counts the team onto the bus every time without fail, like a teacher on a field trip.

“Don’t ever fucking yell at Smitty like that again,” Augustin says, and Kent looks up at him with those wide, earnest grey eyes. The eyes of someone who knows everything. Augustin can barely look at them. For a moment, they just stand there in the dark, empty parking lot of the arena, staring at each other in the eyes; one never wanting to look away, and one wishing to look anywhere else.

“I won’t, I…” Kent looks as if he’s bracing himself for a punch, “Look, the press-”

“What about them?” Augustin asks, and gets on the bus. After a moment, Kent follows him, and the whole entire bus watches owlishly as they sit on opposite sides of the same aisle. He can’t tell if the collective sigh is one of relief or disappointment.

They land in Newark, and they have to win this one. Three losses in a row is borderline acceptable for any team sitting in the upper middle. Four is a streak that proves that the rebuild is failing. They have to beat New Jersey.

Kent goes missing once they reach the Devils’ practice facility for the mandatory morning skate. Augustin’s stomach curdles with worry. He tries to ignore it. They have to beat New Jersey, and his head has to be in the game this time.

He makes it all of three minutes before he’s walking out of the dressing room and pacing the perimeter of the rink. He’s looking for a bright light: the glint of fluorescent white off of blond hair, or a camera, or something. The bright light he gets is an open side door streaming sunlight into the rink.

Kent is standing outside in his peacoat and khakis, breath misting in the cold air as he speaks to a petite girl with long, dark hair, huge green-grey eyes, and freckled, dimpled cheeks. She looks like Constance Parson’s decades-younger twin, right down to the cleverness in her smile. There’s no one that she could be other than Kent’s little sister.

Like she can hear his thoughts, her gaze flicks up, and Augustin’s trapped in her beam as she waves him over, ducking into the arena. She’s beautiful, obviously, and she’s wearing a black Aces jersey that blends into her curly hair over a maroon turtleneck, and he can no easier escape the oncoming path of a freight train.

“Hi, Augustin,” she babbles, her smile wide and unfiltered, “Shit, sorry, we haven’t met, it’s weird for me to use your name, but like…I don’t know what else to call you. Kent calls you Gus, but he’s also, like…you know.”

“Uh,” Augustin says cleverly.

“Shit, right! I’m Elisabeth Parson, Kent’s sister. You can call me Beth. It’s a bummer that you’re not going to make it to brunch with us!”

Over her head, Kent’s staring at him, horror-struck. His mouth opens and closes wordlessly, and Augustin wants so badly to take him by his fucking hoodie and toss him under the bus.

But what would that solve?

“Yeah,” he hears himself say, not impolitely either, because she looks like her mother and it’s not Connie’s fault that her son is a fucking bastard, “Sorry, I can’t cut the morning skate. No letter on my jersey, you know?”

“Yeah, of course,” Beth says cheerily, flicking her bangs out of her eyes. They’re lined with dark eyelashes instead of gold, but they’re so fucking familiar, “It’s great to finally meet you, though! I won’t keep you, I know Wilson is a hardass. I’m sure we’ll see each other again sometime!”

Kent obviously wants to leave as soon as possible, so Augustin says, “Well, I have a few minutes. How’s Princeton?”

Beth smiles so widely, “Oh, it’s great! Except for the fact that it’s in New Jersey.”

They talk about her degree, and she’s as smart as a whip, just as much of a genius as Kent in a completely different way. Kent looks desolate as he watches them converse about Jane Austen and book vs. movie adaptations, and it’s only when Beth drops a heavy-handed “Oh, Kent’s always wanted to go to France, you guys should go together,” that Augustin realizes three things:

She knows that they’ve been together, because of course she does. They are siblings, after all, and clever ones at that.

She’s under the mistaken impression that they’re still dating.

She doesn’t say this last one, or even imply it, but Augustin knows deep in his soul that she can tell that he is still so deeply in love with her older brother that he’s drowning in it.

The first two help her to misinterpret the latter, which is the only reason why he doesn't turn around and walk away abruptly without a goodbye. His words stumble, though, and even though he catches himself quickly, Kent’s eyes snap to him when it happens, and stay narrowed there for the rest of the conversation.

“Bye, Augustin!” she says happily once Cross comes out to yell at him to haul his ass into the dressing room, “I’ll see you when I come to visit before my exams!”

He waves goodbye and spends the rest of practice in a fugue state. It wasn’t smart for him to do that. Now he likes the whole family more than he should. Now he has to remember that before Kent told him that he knew everything about everything and stripped his skin and safety away, Augustin was going to tell him that he was in love with him.

In the Berenger family, love isn’t something you show. His parents despair of his and Angelique’s relationship, which is close and loud, and constantly reassuring. It is this way because in their house, love is something you guard and protect and you do it by keeping it hidden. Angelique thinks that’s fucking stupid, but she’s the only one of them four who does.

Augustin has heard his parents say the words “I love you” three times in his life: to him on his draft day, to Angelique when she won gold in 2010, and to each other on the VHS tape of their wedding. Just because they don’t say it doesn’t mean it’s not there, but saying it means something more.

Those words mean something to him.

Kent comes back happier than he’s been since everything happened, and Augustin feels the sudden, overwhelming urge to try again. But how can he? He’s not the same person that Chris Patenaude loved, and he’s a worse person now than Sebastien had loved. And he’s fucking scared.

Kent has seen every single fucking bruise he still carries with him. Every scar, every bleeding part where bone is sticking out. Maybe today, he’s learned his lesson and won’t press down on the wound, but what about tomorrow? What about the next month, the next year? The next game, the next fight, the next trade or signing? The next time they stand on the ice across from each other at the face-off dot?

He hasn’t wished to be at the Olympics any less in his life.

Augustin believes that Kent is a good man, but good men still do awful things. Things like “You couldn’t even break a fucking sixty point season without me” and “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Unforgivable things.

But also, things like “I don’t just barrel through life with my eyes closed, hoping I didn’t break anything. That’s your fucking job,” and “Jack seems to be doing just fucking fine without you.”

Nobody’s blameless.

Kent taps him cautiously on the shinpad as they line up for the faceoff, and quietly says, “Just…for my sister, okay?”

“Okay,” Augustin replies, equally quiet. It’s not for Kent. It’s for the Aces, and for Beth Parson and her mom in the suite so far above the ice that he can’t see them from here.

They play well. Kent doesn’t falter, and Auugstin manages not to either, and Smitty still doesn’t know what the fuck is going on despite his best efforts to find out, so he’s fine too. The relief of a good, solid game nearly drowns out the noise inside his head.

Late in the third, Kent passes at the right time, and Augustin hears the puck rocket off of his stick and hit the back of the net for the first time in four games. He waits for the sound to fix him, like it always has before.

It doesn’t this time. It leaves him to wonder if it really fixed him all those other times.

They beat New Jersey.

They play good, satisfying hockey, but because it isn’t the mindblowing orgasmic whatever the fuck hockey that people are used to, people are asking why. There’s no avoiding it this time, as Martha from PR steers him out of the dressing room for a post-game interview in the tunnel, making sure that his Aces snapback is affixed firmly to his head. It starts off okay, because they’re still playing good fucking hockey. Any normal coach would be thrilled by their performance.

But as Augustin is quickly coming to learn, there is no leeway for Kent Parson and those who play with him. He can either be great, or there must be something wrong.

“Is there anything affecting the way you’ve been playing?”

“The amount of beauty sleep I get,” he says as a joke, and the journalists laugh, except for the one who asked.

“In the last few games, you’ve gotten one point to Devon Smith’s three and Kent Parson’s five. What are you doing differently that’s not working out for you?”

“If I figure it out,” he tells her flatly, “You’ll be the first to know.”

Between the microphones, Martha glares at him, but says nothing. He answers a few more questions with his usual amount of devil-may-care eloquence, and slinks back into the dressing room to find it empty except for the equipment guys going in and out with their things, and Kent. He’s sitting at his cubby in his suit, one leg propped up on the bench.

“Everyone else is already on the bus,” he says, almost in disappointment. Augustin nods. Troy and Cross are behind this. They might as well have shoved them both into a janitor’s closet and locked the door.

He sits and starts untying his skates. Kent’s watching him over the top of his phone, teeth worrying his bottom lip. The desire that Augustin feels, the thing that drove him that January night in Florida, he still feels it. It might even be stronger now, because they’re playing good hockey in spite of themselves.

It should be enough. Why isn’t it enough?

Kent is an impatient guy. Augustin’s shimmying down his hockey pants when he abruptly says: “Gus- Augustin. Listen. Please.”

His voice breaks over the last word, and he doesn’t keep going. Augustin moves onto his socks and says, “Usually, people follow that up by talking.”

Kent’s lips disappear completely. “I’m sorry-”

“Don’t.”

“I am, I-”

“I know.” Augustin says quietly.

He’s not afraid of insults even when they're honest, and he’s not upset by the things people say when they’re scared. He can’t be, with the career that he has. But Kent is a good man who cradles him like he’s damaged, touching so lightly that it’s unbearable, because he really, truly believes that Augustin is broken.

And if someone who knows him better than anyone has ever known him before thinks that he’s broken, then he actually has to contend with the fact that they might be right.

“Okay,” Kent says quietly, smacking his knees as he rises. “Good game tonight.”

He leaves Augustin to get undressed alone. It takes him another ten minutes to get his shin pads and dry fit shirt off. He forgoes a shower and apologizes to the equipment guy, Jim, by helping him pack the rest of the gear and haul it onto the trolley to take to the bus. The entire time he hauls hockey bags out of the door and tosses them onto the growing tower of black leather blocks, his body is numb.

Kent still gets on the bus last, and Augustin can feel his eyes on the small of his back.

They’re flying out tonight, so Kent doesn’t get to say goodbye to his sister after the game: he tells Cross quietly on the plane that she’s too busy partying to do anything with her lame older brother anyways, and his voice is so undyingly fond that Augustin has to put his headphones on to drown it out.

It takes him getting into his car alone and driving away to realize that the hollow numbness is him missing Kent.

Hockey is a team sport, and it can’t ever be played alone. Augustin knows that, despite what his past career statistics inform general managers and recruits. It involves trust. It involves love.

He doesn’t know how to do either.

What was it that Kent said to him? You don’t like not being good at things. Augustin hates that he’s right.

He gets back to his apartment to find it furnished. He hired an interior designer and a slew of movers, gave them a key and a credit card, and told them to do whatever they wanted before he got back. They’ve done a good job: the only parameter he gave was that he wanted a place that looked like someone lived in it, not a luxury showroom. There are real wooden bookshelves, the windows bordered by hand sawn benches covered in a plush array of cushions, art-covered walls, and a living room with a soft maroon couch and matching armchair, and a plush wine-red rug.

But the lived-in furniture doesn’t make the apartment any less empty, and it doesn’t make him any less lonely.

All his energy leaves him at once, and his back hits the door. He slides down to the floor with a gentle thud, staring at the antique wooden dining table lit in the light from the vintage lampshade that only he will ever sit at. The sight of it grows too painful, and he buries his face in his hands.

For the first time in eight years, he cries.

What does he do now that he’s twenty-five and hockey is no longer enough? What does he do now that it can no longer fix what’s wrong with him?

He doesn’t know. A lot of things have scared him lately. That’s the part that scares him more than anything.

Once he’s done crying, his head aches as fiercely as he remembers. He gets to his feet and stumbles into his bedroom. The air mattress has been deflated and rolled up in the corner, replaced by a plush king-sized bed with grey linen sheets in a room with brick walls and light wooden furniture. He showers mechanically with stolen hotel toiletries, and dries his hair.

It can’t go on like this. Something’s gotta give.

When people are scared, they fight, or they run. Augustin’s always been faster than most of his peers.

Just before he goes to sleep on the left side of the bed, he opens his phone and writes out a text.

Me: I need a meeting with you ASAP.

He gets a reply before he can even put his phone down.

Jerry: If this is about what I think it is, I’ll call you tomorrow.

All he can think about as he falls asleep is how disappointed his father is going to be.

Notes:

this was supposed to be a dual pov chapter and then it suddenly wasn't so. shorter chapter today, 21 chapters total.

the tone of this one is really different, partly because I just finished Us Against You and started The Winners, and the Beartown of it all is seeping into my writing, and partly because I think Augustin is a little too fucked up to have the same stream of consciousness as previous chapters. anyways i personally think he would have majored in English Literature to piss off his dad. or Film Studies.

also sorry about the pits but we have to go down before we can go up.

Chapter 17

Summary:

in which Kent doesn't know what to do either, but he still tries.

Somewhere in between the panic attacks on the bathroom floor and the twelve-thousand phone calls, Kent spares a minute to wonder how the fuck Jack ever managed to forgive him for what he said at Samwell three years ago.

He can’t exactly call and ask. That would violate the unspoken rules of their unsteady armistice that allows Kent some access to the friendship he used to have. Besides, he doesn’t want to hear it if it turns out that Jack hasn’t forgiven him at all, and is instead choosing to be magnanimous and taking the high road and all the high and mighty bullshit Kent remembers hating about him in the Q.

Nobody’s fucking blameless.

In the end, it’s Jeff who calls him the morning after. It wakes him up, even though he doesn’t remember going to sleep. He remembers not being able to breathe, and then regaining the ability after an indeterminate amount of time and calling Augustin, who doesn’t pick up. He then calls all the less horrifying and kitschy hotels off the Strip until a bored concierge at the fourth one that he tries informs him that there is an Augustin Berenger staying there.

“Do you want me to leave a message with him, sir?”

“No,” Kent says quietly, his voice sounding as though it’s gone through an industrial shredder, and hangs up. It’s almost five in the morning when he finally stops walking around his apartment and crashes out on his couch out of his body’s sheer necessity, though he doesn’t remember anything other than sitting down for a moment. It’s eight in the morning when Jeff calls, and they have practice at nine.

“Hey?” he manages to say into the phone, his tongue swollen and mouth gummy and dry. His head hurts, but he doesn’t remember drinking anything last night. All he remembers is a sick pool of lead in his gut that won’t go away, irradiating his stomach lining, his lungs, his heart.

“Did Gus move out?”

Kent shuts his eyes against the sunlight, slowly rubbing a hand over them to make sure he’s still alive and not in one of the worst circles of hell. “I, uh…yeah. Last night.”

He’s too fucking tired to lie, and he doesn’t deserve to do it anyways. He doesn’t even have it in him to ask Jeff how the hell he knows.

“Why?” Jeff asks immediately, “I mean, you guys were like…are like…so why did he move out?”

“Maybe because he’s a grown fucking man,” Kent snaps, “I’ll fucking see you at practice.”

Jeff is trying to say something else, but Kent hangs up on him.

He almost crashes his car on the way to the rink and runs in to find Augustin sitting placidly in the dressing room, half his gear already on as if nothing is wrong. There’s a vacant look in his eyes that Kent’s never seen on him before.

“Hey,” Jeff tries to say, “So, uh-”

“Not now, dude, please.”

He tries to approach, but Augustin wanders away from him, and goes missing, as if he never existed at all. This is normal enough, but what isn’t is that Kent goes looking for him in all the usual places: the bench in the zamboni tunnel, the equipment room, in the stands, but Augustin is nowhere to be found. Kent thought he knew all the places that Augustin hid. He sees now that Augustin kept a few to himself for a rainy day.

It should be impossible to be more hurt than he already is, and yet somehow he manages to find a way. He’s a fucking generational talent like that.

Eventually, he has to finish changing. For the first time in his career, he’s the last person on the ice, and Augustin is already there.

How do you show someone you’re sorry without telling them? With Jack, Kent called and called and called; not to speak, but to show that he still remembered. He also showed up with the Stanley Cup that one time, to prove that it was possible and that he and Jack would have their names on it together soon. It was an earnest promise that Jack took as gloating. And, of course, there was that time he went to tell Jack that the Aces agreed to clear cap space to sign him, but he didn’t even get to the specifics before he was saying things meant to hurt instead.

Clearly, he’s not great at apologizing.

Still, he tries in the ways he thinks are innocuous enough, feeding pass after pass, skating as hard as his sleep-deprived legs will carry him, but Augustin’s…not there. On the outside, he seems fine, almost aloof and unbothered. But he’s not keeping up anymore, not as well and not as fast.

He’s also the first off the ice when practice ends, which Kent has never seen before. He wants to follow the retreating back, but Wilson stops him to talk about strategy and wrangling the younger core for about five minutes, and Augustin disappears down the tunnel as he watches a flurry of faceoffs.

“By the way, you’re passing too much,” Wilson says after they’re done, “Stop it. You know better.”

“Yeah,” Kent mutters, “Sorry. I’ll stop.”

He gets off the ice and already knows that Augustin won’t be in the room when he gets there. He hopes a good game will shake Augustin out of his shell, but it doesn’t. They lose.

A month and a half ago, Kent made a promise to Angelique Berenger. He agreed that he would preserve hockey, no matter what happened in their fucked up, entwined private lives, and he does his best to make sure of it. He still passes too often, enough that Wilson glares at him, but at the end of the day, Augustin’s heart just isn’t in it. He doesn’t want it.

Kent’s terrified that it’s his fault.

He knows he almost took hockey away from Augustin once before, when he was fifteen and boarded Augustin in his second game. Bob lectured him about it the whole way home from the rink, to the point where Kent was swallowing the ache of tears in the back of his throat because he had disappointed NHL legend Bad Bob Zimmermann within a week of even meeting him. He was terrified that all Bob saw was a destructive, angry little kid, and he was terrified that that was all Jack, sitting in the front seat with his dad, would see too.

But after the lecture, Bob turned to him and said, “You’re a good kid, Kenny. You’re going to do great things one day, and you don’t have to tear down other people to get it. That’s not who you are. Remember that, and you’ll be alright.”

He’s having some fucking trouble remembering that right now.

They lose, and then they lose again, and Kent can’t help but feel like he’s breaking his promise even as he tries to keep it. He descends into some strange form of madness, where he tries to control too much at once, sorting players like dolls on the ice. When it goes wrong, he feels a brutal frustration welling deep in his chest. Frustration at the strategies, frustration at the plays, frustration that he keeps ending up in the same damn place he fucking started and nothing ever changes.

The only time he gets a minute to breathe is in his empty apartment, and the breathing is too loud when he’s alone. He makes too much coffee three days in a row, and has to toss it out, along with eggs about to go bad that he doesn’t know how to cook.

Everything gets worse in Detroit.

“I have seen better fucking positioning done by fucking seven-year-olds.”

“Jeez, Parse, let the kid breathe-”

“Did they fucking forget to bake you all the way through in Reno, Smith? Did they blindfold you and spin you around before showing you game tapes? Get it the fuck together-”

He’s being mean to Smitty, and he knows that. He’s been mean to everyone, and he’s forgotten that only a few of them know or remember that he’s been like this before, that this too shall pass. He’s scaring the kids, and pissing off the young guys, but it’s only when Augustin grabs him by the collar and snarls, “Take a walk,” that he really realizes how far he’s gone.

He almost wants to say, so you do care, but Augustin’s jaw is ticking, and he looks like he’s going to break Kent’s nose. Kent just tosses his shoulder pads into his bag and storms out of the room.

He goes for that fucking walk, waiting for the seething in his lungs to settle. When it becomes manageable, he comes back and apologizes to Smitty, who honestly seems to have just tuned Kent out while he was yelling. The kid’s survival instincts are gonna take him far.

Kent intends on going back to the hotel to sleep his shame away before their game tonight, but life, in the form of Swoops and Cross, stops him from leaving.

“Lunch,” Swoops says, like a threat, and calls them a cab to a nearby barbeque restaurant that’s so loud, smokey and dark even during midday that it covers up the three hockey players in the back corner like they don’t even exist. Kent follows his alternates like a nervous rookie to the table, and barely has a chance to sit down and give his drink order to the squat, uncaring waitress before Swoops lays into him.

“What the fuck did you do?” he asks belligerently, voice rising with every syllable, “What the fuck did you do? I have Angelique Berenger blowing up my fucking phone asking why her brother hasn’t called her in a week, and I don’t know what to tell her other than that my fuckass captain is destroying-”

“Swoops,” Cross says gently, stopping Jeff in his tracks. His voice is disappointed, “Enough. Kent, c’mon. We’re your alternates. You gotta tell us what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on!” He basically shouts, “Everything’s fine!”

He’s pretty sure that the last time he was this convincing was when Shetty asked him who broke his TV when he was teaching the twins to play baseball.

Cross and Jeff look at each other for a long time, and Kent can’t tell what weird alternate-captain-Kent-meltdown protocol they’ve developed since Cross was named back in November, but it causes Cross to stand abruptly.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he says, strolling away with his hands jammed in his pockets. It feels less like privacy and more like a trap. Kent shreds the straw wrapper lying in front of him and waits for Jeff to speak.

Jeff’s not particularly subtle. It shows in the clothes he wears, the Christmas lights he strings up on his hedges, and the way he bluntly asks Kent, “So, did you break up with him or did he break up with you?”

“Fuck, Jeff, what the actual hell-”

Jeff raises an eyebrow, and Kent knows that the jig is up. He sighs, “Listen, you don’t…I just…”

“I mean, if you want to come out to me officially so I can tell you that I support you in your process of becoming and all that jazz, we can do that if you want. I’m just getting the vibe that you don’t want to do that.”

“You’re right, I do not.”

“Cool,” Jeff shrugs, “So did you break up with him or did he break up with you?”

Kent glares at him for a moment longer, before the exhaustion catches up to him and his shoulders slump. He hasn’t been sleeping well, and he can feel every lost hour laying into his bones, “We got into it, I mean…I fucked up. Badly. Really fucking badly.”

He tells Jeff everything that he remembers: what he said, what he insinuated, and inevitably, what happened with the Aeros. He leaves out the morbid details and the spreadsheet, because he’s trying to spare Augustin some dignity a little too late, but Jeff still looks homicidal at the end of his rant.

“Shit,” he says once Kent’s drained his water glass. “Well…shit.”

“Yeah,” Kent says hoarsely, jamming his palms so hard into his eyes that he sees colour in the darkness. “I don’t know what the fuck to do.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t either,” Jeff says, which isn’t fucking helpful at all, “But maybe start by apologizing. An apology goes a long way.”

“You want me to apologize? He almost knocked my lights out for yelling at Smitty. He’s not gonna let me within six fucking feet of him.”

Jeff grins, which is foreboding as all hell, “You let me and Cross take care of that, alright? We got you. By the end of this roadie, you’re going to be, uh…is it appropriate to say “in bonetown-”

“No, it isn’t.”

“-and you guys will have your weird, intensely homoerotic hockey chemistry for the rest of your careers, and I get another Cup,” he finishes happily, dragging his phone out of his pocket, “And the next time I see Timothy Goldman, if that decrepit fuck doesn’t die of CTE during the off-season, I’m going to break every single one of his fucking knuckles with a croquet mallet and then cook him into a meat pie and feed him to Debra.”

“Who are you texting?” Kent asks in a panic. If it’s Angelique, he’s going to have to screen his mail for anthrax for the rest of his life. She seems the type to hold a grudge for that long. “I swear to God, Jeff, you can’t tell anyone-”

“Dude, Ethan’s been waiting in the bathroom for ten minutes now,” Jeff says, tapping away, “I feel bad. I’m telling him to come back out.”

Just like he says, thirty seconds later Cross comes back out of the bathroom and glares at them, “You’re picking up the bill, Parse, and I’m ordering so much fucking food.”

He does, and they eat it, and it doesn’t taste like sand or freezer burn for the first time in a week. He feels almost full, and after he naps, he feels almost energized, and then they fucking lose anyways.

It’s not a bad loss, but losing is losing no matter what. He can’t afford to dwell on it; he corrals the press away from Augustin by bribing Martha from PR with sugar-free gummy bears and promises to dogsit her little white rat dogs. Martha glares at him through her horn-rimmed glasses and says, “If it’s not him, it’s you and Troy.”

“I can live with that,” Kent replies on both of their behalf. He might hate the media, but nobody can say that he’s not fucking good at it. When they ask leading questions, he gives flat, useless answers with an appropriately somber face. When they give him room to give compliments, he makes sure to laud his teammates accordingly without laying it on too thick. All the good journalists leave when they realize he’s not giving them anything, and all the bad ones ask enough stupid questions that Martha cuts them off in good time.

After he’s done, the fear that Augustin will see this as charity and get even more pissed off slams into him like a fucking freight train. He waits nervously by the bus for everyone to get on, to make sure that nobody is forgotten like he almost was that one time in his rookie year.

Augustin comes up to him and Kent thinks he’s going to walk right past when he stops and flatly says: “Don’t ever fucking yell at Smitty like that again.”

Kent can’t help but look at him in the golden streaks of lamplight behind the arena. How is it possible that he has to catch his breath every time? He wants to say, you look tired.

Instead, he says, “I won’t. Look, the press-”

“What about it?” Augustin asks, although they both know the exact same fucking thing, and something in Kent’s chest stops rattling around.

They lost to Detroit and now they’re in New Jersey, and they can’t lose this one.

Seeing Beth in-person helps, although seeing her and Augustin together nearly gives him a heart attack. Augustin’s smiling and laughing along with her, and it’s only when she makes an off-handed comment about going to France and his words trip up that Kent sees a gap in the carefully constructed armour.

“He’s great,” Beth beams as they make their way to her rental car. “God, and he’s so fucking hot, like, impossibly hot, like, that accent is obscene-”

“Can you not, please?” Kent begs, for his sanity’s sake more than any sort of jealousy or sense of propriety, “You’re my kid sister, I don’t want to hear about how attractive you find any of my teammates.”

“Not a kid anymore,” Beth sings, and it hits him right in the ribs. She’s as old now as he was back then. She seems so much older than he ever wants her to be, and yet still just a little kid. Part of it is nostalgia. Part of it is something else entirely.

But she cheers him up, because she always does. They eat too much bacon and drink enough coffee to burn a hole in their stomachs, and he lets her talk the whole time. He leaves brunch with a list of book recommendations longer than his arm, and a newfound knowledge of Romantic poetry.

They meet her friends outside the arena, a gaggle of teenagers who think that they’re adults all clustered by the stadium’s VIP gate whispering excitedly as he approaches. There are more guys there than he would like there to be, but they’re all wearing Aces merch, so they get a pass. They’re all nice enough too, though one of them plays lacrosse and he has to hold his tongue about that.

“And this is Roman,” Beth finishes her introductions with gusto, punching one of the taller guys on the shoulder. He’s good-looking enough, if a little skinny and reedy with floppy hazel hair, but his sister’s always been the jock in her relationships.

“Nice to meet you, dude,” he says, and the guy’s palm is sweaty when he shakes it, “Hey, you don’t happen to be doing medieval literature, would you?”

“Uh,” the kid’s face goes pale, and Beth essentially shoves Kent into the arena to get him away from her totally not-boyfriend that she’s totally not dating or whatever she’ll tell him when he asks tonight after the game.

“You’re such a dick,” she hisses.

“I’m just putting the fear of God in him. You gotta let me have a little fun,” he replies, and promises to score her a goal after kissing her on the cheek.

“I don’t want a goal from you,” she tells him as he leaves, “I don’t give a fuck about you! I want a goal from Augustin!”

She’s just having a little fun too, but a hole yawns in his gut as he sits to get ready for the game. He didn’t tell her what happened, partly because he doesn’t want to destroy the image of him she has in her head, and partly because some part of him wants to believe that it was all a bad dream, or something he can easily fix.

Maybe it’s because he hopes that they can come back from this. Parsons are generally too skeptical to be religious, but maybe that’s what it is. Faith.

He has faith, and Augustin looks him in the eye when he says, “For my sister, okay?”

“Okay,” he gets as a careful reply. It’s really for both of their sisters, but one problem at a time.

It’s not the best hockey that they’ve ever played, but it’s good, it’s good enough to make him take a step back from the precipice that he’s been walking along. They keep time, they play smart, and Kent doesn’t pass too much. It’s a familiar rhythm that they settle into, and it ends with Augustin sending the puck into the back of the net off of a pass from Kent. The buzzer doesn’t go, but they win anyway.

Yes, Kent thinks as he takes the celebration as an excuse to scrub Augustin’s helmet. It’s happening.

He thinks about what Jeff said before: An apology goes a long way. Maybe now is a good time to try.

Then he tries, and it doesn’t work. All Augustin says is, “I know.”

What the fuck does that mean, I know? Who the fuck does he think he is, Han Solo? Kent stews about it the entire fucking bus ride to the airport, yanking restlessly at his pant legs while Scraps mutters discontentedly about his shifting around. If Augustin doesn’t want to accept his apology, there’s nothing he can fucking do about it.

Except try again, a sanctimonious little voice says in the back of his head. He shakes it until the voice disappears with a shriek. Yeah, because that turned out so well last time.

He finds the time to sit next to Jeff on the plane back from Newark and casually say, “I’m pretty sure there’s something clinically wrong with your brain.”

“Probably,” Jeff agrees, shutting off his phone and turning to smile placidly at him, “But they’re having trouble pinning down exactly what it is. Go sit with Cross, I’m gonna take a nap.”

Kent obeys, and talks to Cross about Beth’s visit, and in the end as they’re disembarking, Cross pats him on the back and says, “Hey, at least things are looking up.”

Famous last fucking words.

They beat New Jersey, so the media scrum dies down, and then they come back to play the Sabres at home. It should be an easy win, but the entire thing is fucked from the get-go.

Augustin is dead on his feet in a way completely unlike his typical anger-blinded stupidity or lackluster desire. It’s as if he’s not even on the ice, and the Aces are playing a man down for every shift he’s out there. He’s vacant, empty, a shell which funnels pucks to anyone near him who’s wearing an Aces jersey. He has the most accurate shot on the team, maybe in the league, and he doesn’t take a shot once, not once.

It’s like playing with a dead man, or with a boy zoned out on too much Prozac. Kent’s only had experience with the latter, but it’s not a pleasant memory, and not one he’s jonesing to relive.

After the worst fucking shift of the night, where Kent picks up slack for an Augustin who isn’t skating and a Smitty who gets a puck to the ankle and might have broken something, he loses his cool. Augustin is sitting on the bench, staring vacantly at the ice, and something in him that’s been cracked already just snaps.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he shouts, and it’s only when Augustin goes ashen that he looks up and realizes the jumbotron and consequently the national fucking broadcast of their game just caught him yelling furiously at his linemate.

Truly, it’s almost fucking comical at this point, how this keeps happening.

“Fuck,” he hears Swoops say, down the bench, as the camera hastily switches away, “That’s not going to be good.”

They lose 4-2 to the Sabres, and such a loss to the worst fucking team in the league is more than enough to undo the win in New Jersey. In the media’s eyes, it sends them right back to their eight-game losing streak at the start of the season. Kent fields calls all weekend about the flurry of headlines about their failed rebuild, like they’re not still tenth in the league, that culminates in a Sunday morning press conference to change the narrative.

They set up groups of three for interviews: Kent, Scraps, and Cross as the leaders, Petal, Flicker and Buckley as the young guns, and Augustin, Frisk, and Smitty as the first line. Hockey loves narratives.

Wilson goes first, reciting their talking points from memory. He hands it off to Kent, who mechanically follows the hastily written guidelines from PR while Scraps and Cross nod in sage agreement. At one point, someone asks: “Do you feel that team chemistry has anything to do with your recent downturn?”

Kent knows the woman who asked is just doing her job, and that she’s phrased the question in the most polite way possible, but she’s still asking what the fuck is wrong with them, and why Kent was yelling at his teammates. Just not in so many words.

“I think we’re still figuring out some line combinations,” he says, because it’s true for everyone other than him, “Trying to see what works before the playoffs begin.”

Luckily, nobody pries any further. With the benefit of hindsight, he’ll remember this as the calm before the storm: everyone who writes anything worth reading knows that he’s the mouthpiece for the organization. If they want a show, all they have to do is wait, throwing softballs in the meantime before they can swap them out for darts.

Kent makes the mistake of letting Nira call him out of the room to go over some material with Scraps. When they come back, there’s a tiny cluster of Flicker, Petal, and Makela hiding in the shadows of the press room, exchanging nervous glances.

“What’s going on?” Scraps asks in a whisper, and Buckley shakes his head.

“It’s Augustin.”

“They’re ripping him to shreds,” Petal says, face pallid. “It’s like a fucking car crash in slow motion.”

Kent feels his blood run cold. On the stage, Augustin is sitting in the middle, right in the line of fire. Kent hears the questions being fired at the table, and Smitty and Frisk don’t say a fucking word because no one is directing anything at him. They’re all questions for Augustin, and not nice questions either: leading, bristling, argumentative questions. He handles them surprisingly well at first, with polite, measured responses, but they just don’t stop.

“Why isn’t she ending the presser?” Scraps wonders as Martha shifts on her feet nervously when Augustin’s next answer comes out snappish. There’s blood in the water now. Kent’s not sure she could even if she wanted to.

“Do you think your poor performance is a result of your interactions with the team, or is there something else causing it?”

Smitty’s biting the inside of his cheek, left eyebrow twitching dangerously, and Kent can see Frisk’s leg bouncing under the table. They’ve all been media trained, and Frisk has his German stoicism on his side as they stare down the reporter who asked the question. It’s not Ron Arsineaux, who thankfully isn’t here, but that weedy little twerp from Deadspin who doesn’t even like hockey.

They’ve all been media trained, but there’s very little that one can do to media-train Augustin Berenger on a good day, let alone one as shitty as this.

“Say that again?” Augustin asks, his voice suddenly emotionless. There’s a muffled rumble of discontent from the assembled reporters. Even they know that the question has gone too far, been asked in a way that doesn’t allow even the chance of an impersonal answer.

“Don’t,” Kent whispers, as the jackass repeats his question slower and louder, like Augustin’s hard of hearing. “Don’t do it.”

Augustin doesn’t hear him, and he’s sure that if he did, it wouldn’t matter anyways.

“What do you want me to say?” Augustin says lowly into the mic, leaning forward, “Yes, I hate my teammates? Yes, I’m playing like shit? You know what? Here’s a fucking sound bite for you, Leon: it is a fucking miracle that you graduated from whatever online journalism program your father paid for your diploma from, but at this rate you’re never going to cover football or basketball like you actually want to. I get a fat fucking bouquet from the NFL every time you ask me a dumb fucking question and give Deadspin a reason not to reassign you. Feel free to publish that.”

He stands, knocking his chair over, and storms off without another word. Smitty’s struggling to keep a smile off his face when he leans into the mic and says, “The NBA sends him chocolates,” just before Martha can end the presser.

“What the fuck?” Petal says as Augustin blows past him, Martha following hot on his heels with steam coming out of her ears. His voice rises steadily in pitch, “What the fucking fuck?”

“Scraps-” Kent says weakly.

“Yup,” Scraps replies, corralling Petal, Smitty, and Buckley away with Frisk trailing after them like a guard dog. Kent feels his head spinning, and has to put it in his hands for a minute. Breathe in, breathe out. When he lifts it, it weighs about a thousand pounds, but at least he can think.

“Scraps,” he says once he stumbles out of the press room. “I need you and Cross to come with me.”

They follow him without a single question as he goes looking for the inevitable meeting happening upstairs in the offices. They can hear the arguing from the elevator, mostly Jerome and Martha going at it in the conference room at the end of the hall. Kent inhales deeply and squares his shoulders. He’s not really well-versed in anything corporate, but he’s not about to let them throw Augustin under the bus.

They’re about halfway down the hall when he spots Augustin sitting miserably in one of the empty conference rooms, three doors down from the arguing. His phone is lying face up on the table, buzzing so persistently that it seems to be trying to jump off the edge. Kent makes eye contact with him and stops, Scraps nearly walking into his back.

“I got it,” he says to Augustin’s carefully emotionless face, “Okay? I’ve got it.”

After a moment, Augustin nods, turning his phone over so the screen faces the table. Kent forces himself to keep walking.

“Know what you’re doing, Parse?” Cross asks hopefully.

“Nope. Not even a little bit.”

Whatever argument is being had stops abruptly when he walks in. He pastes a smile onto his face, “Yikes, tough crowd.”

“Kent,” Hollis says, standing upright, “I was about to call you.”

“Huh, call it a premonition, then,” he leans his hip against the wall and crosses his arms. “I assume this is about what just happened?”

Jerome scoffs, gesturing wildly, “Yeah, this is about the fucking public relations nightmare-”

“He’s sitting down the hall,” Cross says coldly, “C’mon, Jerome. Don’t come at him like that. He’s one of us.”

“Is he really?” some bald fuckwad who works with Hollis on recruitment challenges, “This is exactly why I was against trading for him. Nobody can get along with the man, he’s not the right kind of guy for this team-”

“Hey, man, that’s not true,” Scraps says defensively, at the same time Cross barks, “Says fucking who, Robert?”

God, Kent loves his team more than anything. He can’t even fathom the fact that at the beginning of the season, he asked to be traded. There’s no timeline or parallel universe in which he could stomach not being an Ace. “Okay, so, I think that’s pretty indicative of our feelings on the matter.”

“There have to be consequences,” Bald Robert mutters mutinously, “Or else they’ll think we run an unprofessional organization. The kid has to suffer some sort of consequence. He fucking ripped into a reporter! He’s immature, he’s got anger-management issues-”

“Bullshit,” Kent snaps. Everyone turns to look at him: Cross, Scraps, Wilson, Hollis and Martha, and all the other people in suits whose names he can’t remember. “He was getting it from all sides-”

“Yeah, Kent,” Jerome says, annoyance dripping from his voice, “That’s part of his job. You don’t seem to have a problem doing it.”

“No, sitting at that desk and speaking into the mic is part of it,” Scraps retorts before Kent can start throwing chairs through the windows, “That presser should’ve finished three questions before we got to that point, we all saw where it was going. They were laying into him like I’ve never seen.”

“Mr. Scarpello’s right,” Martha says quietly, “I’ll take responsibility for that, the press conference should have ended earlier. But they lay into him because they know he’ll give them a reaction. He has to stick to his media training.”

“He’s been a problem before-” Jerome starts.

“Yesterday was a bad game,” Kent says, breathing deeply through his nose because he can’t yell at his boss, even if he really wants to, “We all have bad games. Fuck, sometimes we have bad seasons. He’s tied for fifth in the league in points, and you’re letting a bunch of rumours that we’re standing here telling you aren’t true decide what to do about him.”

Jerome at least has the decency to look a bit ashamed. Hollis’ mouth twists slightly, pursing as he paces back and forth, “We’ll have him issue a print statement apologizing to the guy from Deadspin. Jerome, get his agent on the phone.”

“Just that?” Kent asks warily. Hollis glares at him.

“Don’t push it, kid. You’re lucky that you two have been producing as well as you have before this week. I suggest you get back on the saddle.”

“Cool,” Kent says, making sure not to show his utter terror on his face as he claps his hands together, “Great talk, ladies and gentlemen! See you tomorrow night for the game.”

They all file out, and Kent watches Martha disappear into the conference room that Augustin is in. He wants to wait, but Cross claps him gently on the shoulder, “Give him space, Kent. It’s like you said. We all have bad games.”

“Yeah,” Kent replies as he tries to eavesdrop on the murmured conversation, even though he can only make out one in five words. “Right.”

He drives home to an empty apartment. For a minute after he gets home, he stands alone in the foyer and wonders why he keeps putting the car keys in the dish. He’s the only one who drives now, he can put them wherever he wants.

They clatter into the dish anyway, and Kent passes out on the couch for the fifth night in a row. He doesn’t remember what he dreams exactly, there’s a bunch of talking playing cards and weird music involved, but the guest bedroom has somebody in it, so it can’t be a nightmare.

He wakes up long after dinner, and when he opens his freezer, it’s so full that about ten frozen meals come cascading out, a few barely missing his feet. He piles them back in as best as he can, sticking one into the oven at random.

Kit leaps up onto the counter as he eats, butting her head against his hand.

“You’ll never leave me, right?” he asks as she noses around his salmon. She seizes a piece and scampers away to eat it in the corner, “Oh, okay.”

His phone buzzes against his hip with a text from Beth while he’s washing the dishes: what the fuck happened?

It’s eleven at night. Everything bad happens after eleven at night. His heart drops when he shuts off the sink and opens the linked Deadspin article that she’s sent him.

Berenger on the Chopping Block? Rumours Swirl About Trade Possibilities.

It appears that the great odyssey of Augustin Berenger is on once again, as sources have reported that the forward has formally asked to be traded.

While the Aces’ first line has seen a remarkable improvement since Berenger’s move there from the Canadiens in October, it seems that a rash of losses and a falling out with Aces captain Kent Parson have pushed Berenger’s agent to request another trade on the troubled winger’s behalf. Potential teams include Arizona and Winnipeg.

Berenger’s contract is also expiring after this season, and he will be an unrestricted free agent this July. It leaves us to wonder: what can’t wait three more months until the off-season?

There’s more, but he stops reading it because he’s thrown his phone across the room. It lands on the couch, the sound scaring Kit into his room.

Kent doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his legs already seem to be flailing in mid-air as he hurtles towards the ground. He can hear his heart beating in his ears. Deadspin is a gossip magazine as much as it is a sports website, but even gossip magazines have a standard of proof. It’s low, but it exists.

“Don’t,” he tells himself. “Don’t jump.”

He scoops his phone up off the couch, and hits Augustin’s number before he can stop himself. It rings to voicemail.

“C’est Augustin Berenger, veuillez laisser un message. Merci.”

He hangs up and calls again, pacing back and forth. Kit meows nervously as she comes back out of his room and twines around his ankles.

“C’est Augustin-”

He tries four more times, gnawing his nails into stubs, and eventually Augustin must grow impatient, because he’s getting sent to voicemail after two rings. The dark, twisted lump in the back of his throat swells after his sixth attempt.

He texts: pick up the fucking phone or im coming to ur house

He calls again, and this time, someone picks up on the second ring.

“Did you request a trade?” He asks before Augustin can get a word in edgewise.

Augustin’s voice is cold. “Are you fucking kidding me, Kent? What are you talking about?”

Kent can’t keep the coldness out of his own voice. “I’m not in the fucking mood for your avoidant bullshit. I read the Deadspin article. Just tell me whether it’s true or not.”

Augustin is silent for a moment, and then he shortly says, “You sound like my fucking dad.”

There’s a click, and Kent throws his phone at the wall again. This time, it leaves a dent in the plaster and falls benignly to the ground, screen black and spiderwebbed with cracks. He scoops it up on his way to the door, pulling his coat on with his keys between his teeth.

He’s pretty sure he breaks about eight traffic laws on his way to Augustin’s new apartment, the address of which he found through Jeff the day Augustin moved in. He’s resisted going there until tonight, but all that learned restraint is out the window. He pulls up on the quiet residential street that the building is on, and bustles in.

The doorman takes one look at him, eyes widening into saucers, and says, “For Mr. Berenger?”

Sometimes, fame has its perks. He gets buzzed in without any fuss.

Augustin’s apartment is at the end of the non-descript hallway, and he slams his fist on the door so hard that the numbers rattle.

“Augustin!”

He can hear Augustin in there, talking furiously on speakerphone with his agent. He can’t hear exactly what’s being said, just like the press conversation with Martha, but they both sound angry. He’s not above pressing his ear to the door.

“Just fucking fix it,” he hears Augustin snarl, “I have to go.”

“Are you kidding me?” his agent says darkly, “Augustin, you can’t keep causing me these fucking headaches-”

“This one isn’t my fault!” Augustin shouts loud enough that Kent can hear it without pressing his head to the door. The following silence is ringing.

“Shit,” his agent says quietly, resigned, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, kid, I just…wish my job was easier.”

“Me fucking too,” Augustin says mutinously, though his voice is no longer shaking. “I have to go.”

“We need to talk about this more. The Aces PR and I can kill the Deadspin story, but-”

“We will,” Augustin says, his voice coming closer, “But right now, Kent Parson is standing outside my door and he’s not going to fucking go away until I answer.”

“Oh, shit-” the agent’s voice is cut off as Augustin abruptly hangs up, and Kent barely has time to leap away from the door before he hears the lock click.

Augustin opens the door, and for a moment, he looks scared. Kent flinches at the look of it: he’s seen anger and annoyance aimed at him, loathing and bitterness, but he can’t think of a single fucking time anyone has ever looked scared of him.

“My neighbours are going to fucking hate me after you tried to batter down my fucking door,” Augustin says flatly, eyes shuttering, “How the fuck did you get in?”

Kent wants to run away, but he made Angelique Berenger a promise and he’s going to fucking keep it.

“I want to lift a Cup this year,” he says before Augustin slams the door in his face, placing his palm straight-armed against the slate-grey wood. “Okay? I don’t need you to need me, or want me, or even fucking like me. I want us to fucking win. Can you do that, Berenger? Can you play some good fucking hockey?”

Augustin stares down at him, brow furrowed. Kent watches his jaw tick once, then twice, and his head tilts to the side.

“What?” Kent says, voice edging into a taunt. He doesn’t know why he’s biting, but if biting down and holding on means that Augustin stays, then that’s just what’s going to happen, “I get it, you don’t know what to do when someone cares about you. Fucking fine. Push everyone away. Cry me a fucking river. But what was it that you said in October? If we play as well tomorrow as we did today-”

“You’re going to be stuck with me for the rest of your career.” Augustin says quietly. They stare at each other, and Kent can feel his heart beat five times in his ears before Augustin stands aside and says, “Take off your shoes.”

“I want to taste fucking silver, Augustin,” Kent says as he storms in, kicking off his loafers as Augustin shuts and locks the door behind him. “I want to taste fucking silver, and I know that you do, too.” He spins around to look at Augustin, his words sputtering out of him almost without thinking, “So if I have to apologize, I’ll do it again. If you want me to bow and scrape, I’ll do that too. Whatever fucking…humiliation, or groveling, or whatever the fuck it’ll get your shit back in order, I’ll do it if it means that you play like you fucking mean it.”

Augustin’s leaning back against the door, arms crossed over his ratty Habs t-shirt and hair falling out of his headband. He raises an eyebrow when Kent’s finished yelling, his voice sharp, “Are you done?”

“Yeah, I’m done,” Kent spits in reply, “And now I’m going to put my fucking shoes back on, you Canadian prick. See you at practice tomorrow.”

An arm hits his chest as he leans down to grab his loafers, leveraging him upright. Augustin's hands grip either side of his shoulders, and he walks Kent backwards until his spine hits the opposite wall, left shoulder hanging in empty air. His breath leaves his lungs.

“Don’t you ever,” Augustin’s voice is dark and cold, verging on metallic, “insinuate that I don’t play like I mean it.”

“Put your fucking money where your mouth is,” Kent replies softly, “Get us a fucking Cup, Berenger. I want my name inscribed on that fucking thing.”

“That’s all you want?”

“That’s all I want.”

He’s lying, and Augustin knows he’s lying, because he’s got a leg pressing up between Kent’s thighs, and Kent can barely breathe, barely resist the pressure. Anyone who fucking walked in would know that Kent was lying on sight. He has to look away from this, at anything else, or else it’ll all be too much.

“Don’t you ever,” Augustin pants, gripping Kent by the jaw and forcing their eyes to meet, “fucking lie to me again.”

Kent doesn’t have time to say that he would never lie to anyone ever again if Augustin asked before he’s surging upwards and kissing him as hard as he can.

Kent has always been a numbers sort of guy. A season is eighty-two games, and maybe sixteen more, give or take, if you’re really lucky. He knows exactly how many NHL hockey games he’s played in his career, and it's seven-hundred and forty-nine.

He knows the number of people he’s kissed like he means it, and it’s two.

For a moment, there’s no response, and then Augustin kisses back like he’s drowning on dry land. The noise Kent lets out is so embarrassing that if anyone ever replayed it for him, he’d deny it was him and then run away to die of mortification, but he does it again as Augustin yanks him off the wall and starts pushing him backwards down the hallway.

The apartment is unfamiliar to him, but they make it to the bedroom somehow. It’s dark, which is about all Kent notices before his clothes are off and the rubber is on and he’s saying Augustin’s name like a prayer in his ear in between frantic kisses across his jaw, his neck, his shoulder, and the hands holding him like he means something.

And maybe that’s what it is. Praying.

When he was a kid, he used to pray to the hockey gods as if they were actual gods. He’d clasp his hands nearly over his Rangers-patterned comforter and ask out loud for an extra goal, or magically sharpened skates, or a better stick with the right amount of flex. As he got older, he stopped, because he’s not a kid anymore and hockey is a game where chance plays much less of a role than one might think. Prayers imply that what you do is futile on your own, and Kent doesn’t do futility.

So maybe that’s why he’s fucking praying now.

He’s out of breath by the time Augustin returns from the bathroom with a towel and falls onto the left side of the bed. Now he can take in the room: brick walls, a small balcony, utilitarian grey sheets, and real wooden furniture, like the kind his dad made for his mom when they got married, except without the initials in the corner.

Augustin tosses the towel on the floor, a hand settled over the solid planes of his stomach. Kent watches him stare at the ceiling and breathe deeply, in and out, and doesn’t say anything. He can see the baby deer look in Augustin’s eyes. He doesn’t want to spook him and send him running.

“I did tell Jerry that I wanted a trade,” Augustin eventually tells him, his voice measured, “He convinced me not to get one.”

Kent’s pretty sure he already knew that, but it still hurts to hear it. He closes his eyes for a moment, and pushes away the first thought that comes to his mind: I’m never going to be happy, am I?

What do you do when you’re Kent Parson, arguably the best player in the world, and yet hockey isn’t enough for you? Do you feel greedy? Do you feel as though you should have gotten more, that you deserve more than the fame and talent that a hundred-thousand hockey players would kill you for? Or do you try to be happy with all the trophies that your name is on and forget the rest?

“I’m sending him a fruit basket,” Kent finally manages to say, once he realizes that he’s been quiet for too long. “Seriously, is he allergic to anything?”

“Pineapple.” Augustin says robotically, picking at the seam of the sheets, “He says that Vegas is preparing to offer me a contract extension and that asking for a trade would cause them to rescind it. Five years, six million a year, and a five-team no-trade list.”

Kent can’t help but scoff. They’re wildly undervaluing him, but their contract negotiations with his restricted free-agent contract started low too. It’s Vegas, but the front office doesn’t like to gamble.

“Look, they’re playing hard to get right now, but we have the cap space for seven-”

“I’m not re-signing here,” Augustin says quietly, still staring up at his bedroom ceiling, “The Jets are going to offer me seven million a year for eight years with a complete no-trade clause, as long as I finish fifth in the league or higher in points. I’m going to take it. Jerry will negotiate first, but I told him I want to take it.”

He feels his heart hit the floor with a wet splatter, rolling under the massive king-sized bed, “I just said-”

“It’s not about the fucking money, Kent.”

For a moment, Kent wants to hit him. He balls his fist against the sheets and says, “The Jets are no closer to winning a Stanley Cup than we are to fucking…world peace.”

“The Jets are second in the league right now. The Aces are tenth.”

“You’re going to have to live in Winnipeg. That’s in Manitoba, by the way.”

“It’s closer to home, and it’s closer to Angie. The real estate is cheaper, too. Now that I have a no-trade clause, I can finally buy a house of my own. A big one, maybe one with a lawn.”

Kent says, “I want you to stay.”

Augustin turns his head to look at Kent, and his eyes are empty, “You want a lot of things.”

And Kent knows what that means all too well. This is an old story, and it ends the same way every time, and there's nothing that can be done to change that. He reads the book, front to back, and then he shuts it. When he opens it again, the words are familiar. The other boy says I’m already all in or he says, it’s the two of us forever, Kenny and then he leaves.

So with nothing left to lose, he asks, “If I hadn’t said anything, would you have ever told me?”

Augustin blinks at him, almost bewildered, “Kent-”

“I’m serious,” he props himself up on his elbow, looking at Augustin so that he can’t run away, or hide, even if he wants to, “Where did this whole thing end for you? Because in my head, it was going to be you and me here, with contract extensions and no-trade clauses until they had to pay us to retire. I would have taken a pay cut if cap space was an issue, no matter what my agent said. And when we won the Cup, this year, or next year, or the year after that, I was going to hand it to you.”

He’s been thinking about it ever since that first game, long before he ever knew that he wanted Augustin like this. That’s what good hockey does: it transcends the lines between emotions, it encompasses everything, until there’s no real distinction between the different kinds of love and loyalty. He dreams about it at night, sometimes. There’s no kiss at center ice, no cameras capturing it from all angles. He just hands Augustin the Cup, and their hands brush, and he watches Augustin lift it high and finally prove to everyone else what Kent’s known since he was fifteen years old: that Augustin is one of the best players in the fucking world.

But Kent’s not going to Winnipeg. Not even for Augustin, not even if they give him all the money in the world. The Aces are his fucking team, and if he’s going to win again, he’s going to win wearing black and silver. So he wants to know when Augustin fucking gave up that dream he thought that they shared before it’s gone forever.

After all, he wasn’t the one that said “you’re going to be stuck with me for the rest of your career.”

Augustin just looks at him, eyes unreadable, and something in Kent falls apart soundlessly, “When you said you were all in, I fucking believed you, so I want to know when you were planning on giving up.”

“I don’t know-”

“Bullshit!” Kent cries, leaning forward to jab a finger into Augustin’s pale, bare sternum. “Maybe I shouldn’t have pried, and maybe I shouldn’t have sprung it on you, and for that I’m sorry. But either you were going to lie to me for the rest of our careers, or you knew you would be done before you had to tell me-”

When he says careers, he means the rest of our lives, and they both know it. That’s all they can see ahead of them, how many seasons they might have left. They’re numbers kinds of people.

“I was going to lie to you.”

Kent stops. Augustin’s glaring at him, fists balled in the sheets

“It’s not about you, it’s never been about you. I haven’t even told my fucking parents,” he snarls, “So what the fuck do I owe you, Kent? You’re just some fucking guy I play hockey with-”

“No, I’m not,” Kent says with absolute surety.

“-and when this is all over, when we’re washed up old fucks, they’ll bring us together for Aces Cup runs once every six or seven years, and what? I’m just supposed to let you walk around knowing?”

“You were supposed to trust me.”

“Well, I don’t.” Augustin spits, “I don’t fucking trust you.”

Kent can’t help it. He laughs. Augustin doesn’t trust him? Augustin trusts him every night whether he wants to or not, trusts him to stand in the right place and make the right pass, to lie about injuries and to take revenge on penalties and chirps. Every fucking night they go out onto the ice and trust each other implicitly. What the fuck else is there?

“You don’t fucking trust me,” he echoes, “But when you thought I didn’t know, you were going to stay, weren’t you?”

Augustin takes a long time to quietly say, “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I…” he swallows loud enough for Kent to hear, “I…”

Kent thinks he knows what Augustin wants to say. He’s seen that look before, in mirrors and on camera when he talks about the two things he loves more than anything in the world. He rolls out of bed and pulls his pants on. Augustin’s eyes, so avoidant in the last week, don’t leave his face as he pulls his hoodie back on and zips up his fly.

“Sign in Winnipeg, or don’t,” Kent says, each word torn from his mouth like a method of torture, as if his fingernails are being ripped out one by one, “But I’m not waiting for you after the season is over. If we lift the Cup this year, it’s yours after me. If we don’t…” he has to swallow twice before he says, “You’ll still hold it one day. But if you keep on the way you’re going, it’ll be a stranger handing it to you, and that would be a fucking shame.”

Kent Parson knows what it means to be abandoned, smacked around, isolated and scared. He watched his father die slowly before he was eight, he shook his half-dead best friend helplessly with emergency services in his ear, and every year he makes it this close to that singular glowing success that he had at nineteen years old, when he still had enough anger and hatred and sorrow to burn the wick at both ends, only to fall short. Every year, he gets older.

He doesn’t want to be as scared at twenty five as he is at twenty four. That defeats the whole fucking point.

“You trust me,” he says, and it’s not a question. “So stop fucking running, because the farther you go, the longer it’s going to take for you to come back.”

For fuck’s sake, he sounds like his mom, spitting long-winded aphorisms in the middle of a bedroom, but Augustin blinks at him in the darkness with those massive dark eyes and Kent doesn’t have it in him to feel embarrassed. He’s got enough long-winded aphorisms to spare. He’s smarter than he used to be, and more importantly, he’s wiser. Wise enough to notice that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s a fucking relief to finally realize that he’s not the same person he was when he was eighteen after all.

“Are you done?” Augustin asks, almost timidly.

“Yeah,” Kent croaks, unable to quell the disappointment welling up in his throat. “For tonight, at least. Call your sister back, she's worried about you.”

He turns to go, making sure to collect his socks from the floor and stuff them into his pockets so he doesn’t forget them. Behind him, Augustin finally says it, less like a confession and more like an observation: “I love you.”

The fact that those words are easier for him to say than what happened to him makes Kent want to put his fist through a wall. But the walls here are brick, so all he does is reply, “I know. See you tomorrow.”

This time, it’s him who leaves. He’s never done that before, and somehow, it doesn’t feel as satisfying as he thought it would.

Notes:

currently divided between wanting edmonton to get swept tonight for defeating both the canucks and stars, and how bad i would feel if they actually did get swept in the finals. i'm not above the sympathy i always feel for the losing team (unless they're boston, fuck boston)

Chapter 18

Summary:

in which Kent steps up, Augustin is still scared, and the world's most homophobic sport has its second gay scandal

The article has been taken down by the time Kent wakes up the next morning.

It turns out that the jackass from Deadspin who wrote the article is the same one that Augustin yelled at, and he just made the whole thing up as an excuse to slag him off some more. All’s well that ends well: Deadspin fires the writer for making up sources, and Augustin doesn’t have to swallow his pride and apologize or lose out on the contract that he’s not taking anyway.

Except that Kent knows the truth. Augustin did ask for a trade, the request just never made it to the front office.

Augustin walks into the dressing room the next day, and sits down beside him, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Kent replies. He’s been replaying the words from last night over and over in his head: I love you, I love you, I love you. Augustin looks like he’s doing the exact same thing, not to mention the fact that they’re both hyperaware that neither of them is walking quite right. He hopes nobody will notice, but at one point, Jeff looks between them and grins widely, throwing a thumbs-up and an eyebrow wiggle so severe that Kent wants to crawl into his cubby and never leave.

“Fuck you,” he hisses as he passes by.

“Me?” Swoops says, fluttering his eyelashes dramatically, “How would Au- OW!”

Then they play some fucking hockey about it, because what else is there to do?

Whatever he said the night before must have wormed its way into Augustin’s head. The residual animosity is blissfully gone. They play pristinely, and Kent’s pretty sure that he sees Wilson sighing with relief as they seamlessly run breakout drills and offensive zone entries, and Kent gets to beat the back of the net into submission with a shot after perfect shot. His arms hurt midway through practice, and his legs follow ten minutes later, but it’s a dangerously good ache. The chirps return in full force, as if they had never left.

“You’re so fucking slow today, it’s unreal,” Augustin says as he skates by between drills, “What crawled up your ass?”

Kent chokes on his spit, but Augustin’s already gone with only a wink so quick that he’s half-sure that he made the whole fucking interaction up in his head.

“Mom and Dad are back together,” he overhears Smitty telling Petal and Ruben, like they’re spies talking in code. Petal cheers loud enough that a few others skate over to ask why, and Kent reminds himself to turn his phone to silent after practice so nobody can get too involved in his business. Across the ice, he can hear Augustin snickering.

The season has less than thirty games left, and he can feel the adrenaline rushing through his muscles as he gets off of the ice and drives home. They have a couple of days off before they play Tampa for the second time this season, and Kent almost invites Augustin over to watch game tape as if nothing has happened. But they both know that something has.

Augustin doesn’t smile as they walk towards their cars, but he does say, “See you later, Parson.”

Kent replies, “You’re walking a little funny. Are you sore?”

Augustin flips him off over his shoulder as he gets into his ugly white sedan, and for once, Kent’s ribcage doesn’t feel as hollow.

The thing about hockey is that it’s fast in all respects. One team’s misfortune, however bad, is typically overtaken by the next flashy opinion that the media decides to debate within a week. Usually, Kent is glad to let someone else take the mantle and wait for his next turn in the media ring, however blissfully long or short his reprieve from scrutiny is. Whatever, the poor sucker probably had it coming.

Not this time.

He doesn’t actually find out himself. It starts when Augustin calls, and he misses it because the blender is on. He leaves his phone in his room as he wanders around his kitchen drinking the protein shake, staring out the window at the cars passing below his development, winking in the sunlight. It’s peaceful, to be without technology. He should do this more often.

That’s before his apartment door opens, and Augustin walks in like he still lives here. “I called you eight fucking times, Parson! Crisse de tabarnak!”

Kent shrieks at the sudden incursion, dropping his smoothie, because he’s only fucking human. Luckily, it slides into the sink, and he turns around with his hand pressed to his chest to slow his rapid heartbeat. “What the fuck? How did you-”

His spare keys are dangling from the keychain Augustin’s busily stowing away, “Have you seen it?”

His eyes are wide and panicked, and unease sets low into Kent’s gut. Augustin’s hands are shaking, and he’s so pale that he’s almost green, rocking back and forth in a daze. Kent asks, “Seen what?”

“How have you not seen?” Augustin rants, “You are always on your phone, it’s literally glued to your hand, how can you not have seen it?”

“Gus-”

“Jesus H. fuck,” Augustin mutters, kicking off his shoes and brushing past Kent. He shoves his hand into his jacket pocket and tugs out his phone, flipping it to show him.

Seattle Schooners defenceman Andrew Cooley photographed yesterday in Toronto with AHL callup

Kent sees the photograph before he can read the rest of the text, and has to close his eyes against the sight of it.

Andrew Cooley was the first-round pick by the Schooners three years ago, a nice kid with a very prominent head of almost white-blond hair and a very unique tattoo on his bicep that’s on full display in the photo of him kissing a brown-haired man in the familiar shadows of the Maple Leafs’ away tunnel. It’s hazy but unmistakable: the other man is taller than Cools is, and wearing a backwards snapback with the Schooners AHL team’s logo.

Cools’ other nickname is Iceman because he was an Air Cadet, and he was the third-place Calder nominee last season, and he has a wicked slapshot that has almost broken Harley’s ankle once. Somehow, Kent’s sure that they’re never going to bring any of that up again for the rest of his career.

Augustin yanks his phone back, stoic face flickering with uncertainty, “Some independent sports page in Toronto broke the story an hour ago. I thought it was fake, but it’s not, it’s all over Twitter, and I…fucking hell. It finally happened.”

It finally happened. Kent thinks about all the hidden corners, all the nooks and crannies they’ve done things in, just in the short time where they were doing things at all. His throat dries out at the fear on Augustin’s face; he’s been doing it a lot longer than Kent has. It could’ve just as easily been him. Either of them.

Augustin clearly doesn’t know what to do, and neither does Kent, but he’s the one with the C on his jersey. He can’t afford to stand around panicking; there’s a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of the AHL who just got forcibly shoved onto the national stage with no clothes on. It’s not like Jack, and it’s not about him anymore. It’s not about any of them.

“Stay here.”

He grabs his phone from his bedroom and ignores the flurry of texts in the Aces groupchat in favour of his contacts list. Augustin’s still standing like a lost sheep in his foyer, so Kent points at him.

“Who on the Schooners’ captaincy do you have a number for?”

Augustin swallows sharply, “Uh, Brewster, I think. He’s still the A, right?”

“Get him on the phone,” Kent says, “Call him until he picks up. When he does, tell him to give the kid my number. If he asks why I’m giving him my number…tell him why.”

It takes a hell of a lot to knock Augustin off-kilter, but somehow, he manages, “Kent-”

“I’m not fucking around,” Kent tells him, already dialling a number so Augustin will stop arguing with him. He doesn’t have time to panic, or even think. He doesn’t even have time to breathe. “If he asks, tell him why. Use the words, if you have to. Hopefully, he won’t ask.”

Brewski is a big fuck-off farm-raised Alberta guy, but he also tapes up his stick with rainbows without a fuss and voluntarily works with You Can Play. He’s not a nice guy on the ice, but he’s a good man off of it. It’s not a guarantee, nothing is in their line of work, but it’s as close as it gets.

Kent doesn’t owe the world anything. Not his identity, not his personal life, none of the things he keeps tied up and stowed away for safekeeping. He doesn’t owe Andrew Cooley anything either. But how would he live with himself if he just sat back and watched a kid take the hits like that? His career will survive this, no matter what happens, and there will be time for righteous anger and existential fear later.

Augustin nods, “Who are you calling?”

Kent is about to answer when he hits the voicemail of the Schooners’ captain, Anders Engstrom, and waves Augustin off to focus on his task. He was expecting Engstrom not to pick up, and sort of hoping for it. It means that he can call the other Schooners' alternate captain without undermining anything.

Shetty picks up on the second ring, “Parse, this isn’t a great time-”

“Shetty, hey,” he says, “Look, I just saw- I’d ask how it’s going, but I’m guessing not well. Are you driving?”

“Yeah,” Shetty blows out a breath, “Yeah, it’s…I’m on my way back to my place right now, Matty’s staying with me. He’s, uh…the kid they called up from the AHL that Cools was…you know.”

“How bad is it?” Kent asks, and there’s a pulse of silence. That question can be about any number of things: the fan response, the press reaction, or what Kent’s most concerned about—the two kids who just got exposed to the entire world against their will.

“It’s not good,” Shetty finally says shortly, “It’s not…Cools is fighting it tooth and nail, he wants to deny that it’s him, but there’s no way. Matty could probably make the case that it’s not him, but apparently they’ve, uh…been dating for a couple of years now. They have a fucking place together in Tacoma. Look, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this-”

Kent probes his temple with a hand, a sudden vise gripping his brain. Augustin finally gets through to Brewski, and wanders into the guest room for some privacy, closing the door with a snap. The apartment is suddenly startlingly cold when he’s alone in the living room.

“Give him my number,” he says, “Give them both my number. Tell them to call me.”

“Look, Parse, I appreciate that,” Shetty says tersely, “Really, I do, but this isn’t your team. I don’t see why it’s any of your-”

There’s never going to be a better time or place than now. Kent swallows the bile in his throat. All at once, he’s not Kent Parson, Aces captain. He’s the rookie living in Shetty’s basement, thinking that he’s just lost his second father figure only to find a third, and it’s one of the hardest things in the world, to be a boy telling his father that he’s gay.

Sometimes, when it’s either really late or really early, he thinks about how he never got to come out to his dad. He wonders if that would have mattered at all in the long run.

“Shetty,” he says very seriously, “Did Jack Zimmermann call you or Brewski today?”

“Yeah, he called Brewski like ten minutes ago, and told him to give the kid his…” Shetty trails off, and there’s the sound of a car shutting off on the other end of the line, “Shit, Parser. Are you fucking with me right now? Or-”

“I’m not fucking with you,” Kent replies softly, because he can’t say it, “I’m not. And you can tell the kid, uh…”

Shetty sounds punch-drunk, “Matty. Matej Kaminsky, but they call him Matty.”

“Yeah, tell the kid why he can call me. If he asks.”

Shetty’s quiet for a long moment before he nervously says, “Because you’re…”

Something about this whole thing is so comical that it makes him snort, “Oh my God, Shetty, I’m fucking gay, do you need me to spell it out for you? H-O-M-O-”

“Alright, alright, Jesus. You know,” Shetty muses, “That makes a lot of sense, now that I’m thinking about it-”

“Alright,” Kent says hastily. “I don’t think you have time to speculate right now. Let me know…how everything goes.”

He’s about to hang up when Shetty says, “Hey, kid?”

His stomach roils, “Yeah?”

“Thanks for telling me.”

One time, Kent called Shetty ‘dad’, and was ruthlessly chirped about it for three weeks until the team found out what happened to his actual dad. His first Aces Father’s Trip, he expected an empty seat next to him on the plane, since Bob was still in Montreal with his real son. Instead, Shetty sat down next to him. His dad couldn’t make it, he explained, and he needed to practice being an overbearing dad for the daughter he had on the way. Kent was chirped to oblivion for the whole trip, but he’d never go back and change it.

“Yeah,” Kent says hoarsely, “Go take care of your guys.”

He doesn’t have to say it. Shetty does that anyway.

He hangs up and throws his phone onto the coffee table to wait. He can imagine what’s going on in the Shetland household right now: Kendra smothering her prospect with tea and dietician-approved snacks, Maeve sneaking into the room when she’s not allowed, the twins signing into their anonymous hockey Twitter accounts ready to wreak havoc on the internet in defence of their new housemate. Kent can’t help but laugh despite the anger swallowing him as he picks his phone back up. Those accounts are now the only thing he’s never told Shetty about.

He searches Matej’s name and sees that people are already guessing that it’s him on Twitter. He’s a year older than Cooley, and still paying his dues on the farm team. It’s early enough in the scandal that if Kent scrolls down far enough, there are articles in local Seattle papers talking about how he’ll probably make the roster next season. He watches those headlines disappear, and the red-hot anger seething in his chest threatens to swallow him.

The kid looks happy in the official headshots, where most players look sallow and miserable. Kent tries not to think about how he’d be looking right about now. Scandal is such an ugly fucking word for what this is. It implies that one of those kids has done something wrong when Kent knows that neither of them has done anything other than get a little too excited before a game.

Augustin wanders out of the bedroom after a few more moments, “Yeah, you got it. No worries. I’ll let you go. Bye.”

He hangs up, and Kent’s stomach turns over, “How’d Brewski take it?”

“I had to tell him why I was calling,” Augustin says quietly, staring down at his phone like it’s a bomb about to go off. “So…he knows. He took it well, I think. He didn’t say “I knew it” or anything, he was surprised, but…he’s with the kid. Drew. Andrew, and-”

“Hey, Gus?” Kent interrupts, “You’re rambling. Can you sit down before you pass out?”

It’s a testament to their current predicament that Augustin obeys without a fuss, seating himself gingerly on a grey couch cushion. Kent grabs the remote and throws up Sportsnet, immediately muting it. He wants to know exactly what Brewski said down to the letter and also doesn’t want to know at all. The latter seems safer. He might do something stupid if he knows.

“You told him the important part, right?” he asks, unable to take his eyes off the screen. They’re showing plays and interviews from when Cooley was playing for the Tacoma Mountaineers, picking them apart for clues and insinuations. It doesn’t help that Cooley and Kaminsky were D-partners, and that-

“No,” Augustin says, “I said he could call either of us.”

Kent whips his head around so hard that he feels something in his neck click, “You told him that you’re-”

“Yeah. It’s not about me today,” Augustin says, staring at the screen as he reclines back on Kent’s sofa, “It’s about Cooley and Kaminsky, whether they want it to be or not.”

They sit quietly on the couch watching the scene unfold, and Kent almost startles right off of the cushions when Augustin finally speaks again.

“You know,” he says quietly, “what I’ve been thinking this whole time?”

“What?”

“In Tampa, we didn’t close the curtains.”

And if that doesn’t chill him to the bone, nothing will.

One false move, and he might throw up. He buries his head in his hands, and wishes he could be anywhere else: last week, on Mars, in his childhood bedroom, “Fucking hell.”

Augustin’s still shaking. His hands tremble as he braces his elbows on his knees, and his throat bobs incessantly like the buoy of a fishing rod.

“Are you gonna vomit?” Kent asks, “If you wreck my carpet, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Fuck you,” Augustin replies so weakly that he might as well have said nothing at all.

Kent reaches out tentatively, and Augustin doesn’t protest when he tugs his sleeve, sliding gently to rest his head against Kent’s collarbone. Kent rubs absent-minded circles into his bicep as they watch the soundless television. He tries not to think about what would have happened if this had happened just a year ago, what he might have done. It would be another actress or model that he would have to trick, another series of lonely nights buried underneath covers, another injury he pushed too far that inevitably leaves him trapped and alone with his thoughts.

“Are you going to…” Augustin can’t even say it out loud. He just motions to the TV. Are you going to come out? Are you going to join him?

“I don’t know,” Kent says honestly, “I think…it would take the heat off of the kid, for sure, if I came out too. Everyone would be too busy asking me questions to even bother with him.”

Augustin shakes his head furiously, “Don’t do it for that reason.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you regret it, you’re going to end up blaming the kid for something that’s not his fault,” Augustin’s lips purse, “At least, that’s what I would do.”

They’re not talking entirely about Andrew Cooley anymore, but Kent lets Augustin have his extended metaphors. His phone buzzes insistently on the table, and he flips it over. His heart skips a beat.

Jack

Augustin sees the same thing, and starts to shift back so that he can stand up, “Do you want me to-”

Kent grabs his hoodie before he can move any farther away. “No. Stay.”

Augustin stays, leaning his head back against Kent’s chest. Kent inhales sharply, and hits the call button, holding his phone shakily to his ear.

“Hey, Jack,” he says weakly. Augustin is silent, still pressed against his side.

“Hey, Kent,” Jack’s voice is unsure, “Hey, I just…I wanted to see how you were…or, I guess, how you both-”

“We’re dealing with it.” Kent says, to put him out of his misery. He’s trying not to let it gouge a gash in his gut, the fact that Jack would call him about this, but not to warn him about that fucking kiss at center ice almost three years ago. Sure, they were much farther apart back then, but it had mattered so much more.

Augustin takes his clenched fist and places it between his hands, rubbing it until his fingers loosen from their stranglehold on his own palm. He lets out that shuddering, angry breath. Something is always better than nothing. “How are you doing?”

“My dad’s on a warpath,” Jack says with false levity, “My mom had to stop him from driving down to Toronto himself. He’s, euh…well, you know how he gets.”

“Are the journalists calling you yet?” He tries to keep the angry twist out of his voice, and mostly succeeds. When Jack came out, Kent had to change his number twice to keep the journalists from calling him day and night for weeks. He wouldn’t wish that upon anyone, but there’s still a sick sense of karmic justice to the whole thing.

“I’m forwarding them to my agent,” Jack replies, voice tinny through the speaker, “They, uh, they got Bitty’s number, though. They’re calling him too. God knows why, he doesn’t even play anymore.”

Kent opens his mouth to reply out of his ass, but his phone buzzes insistently with the sound of another call coming in. His gut plummets at the sight of the Seattle area code. “Hey, Jack, I gotta go. Can I…can I call you back?”

“Yeah,” Jack says, and he can’t tell if it’s with relief or disappointment. He wonders if it really matters all that much anymore, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.”

Kent hangs up and hits the receive button before he can second-guess himself, “Hello?”

“Uhm,” a nervous tenor says through the phone, heavily accented. Slovakian, if Kent read the EliteProspects page correctly, “Hello. Is this Kent Parson?”

“Hey, yeah,” Kent says, clearing his throat and trying to sound more sure than he feels, “Yeah, is this-”

“Matej Kaminsky,” Matty says slowly, carefully picking his way through his words, “I get- got your number from Shetty. He said, uhm…that you and I…might have something to talk about?”

Augustin snorts at that, even though he’s fiddling nervously with his hoodie drawstring. Kent wants to laugh too, at the awkward father treatment that Shetty’s giving the both of them, euphemisms and all, “Yeah, kid. I’m sorry about what happened. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. How are you doing?”

Matty lets out a weak laugh, “I am…well, I am having to answer lots of phone calls. It is nice to be making one instead.”

“You should let your agent handle that,” Kent replies, trying not to be too clinical. Matty’s twenty-two, only three years younger than he is, but those three years might as well be decades. “Is there anything I can do? I mean, if you need anything.”

“Well…I am having a question,” Matty says, voice shaking slightly, “Shetty says…you keep this a secret for a long time.”

“Not a secret.” Kent says, maybe too furiously because Augustin lifts his head from Kent’s shoulder and peers at him with dark, unreadable eyes, “Just private.”

“Right,” Matty mutters, “Private. The team is asking me…if I want to say that it is me in the photo. Andrew, they say he has no choice, that everyone already knows. Me, they say…” he does a pretty impressive impression of an American accent, albeit with a bit too much Southern twang for Washington, ““You look like any brown-haired guy in the world.” They are saying I can choose to lie or tell the truth.”

That’s lucky, but Kent doesn’t say that. It definitely wouldn’t feel lucky. “Well, then I guess you have to decide what you want to do.”

“Mr. Parson,” Matty says, his accent not disguising the troubled tremble in his voice, “I just…if I do this with Drew, I am thinking…it will be hard for me to go home after. My parents, they know, but our neighbours, my friends…it would be difficult.”

“I know, kid,” he says quietly, “Listen, you and Cooley are, uh…dating, right?”

“Yes.” Matty says defiantly, and Kent smiles in spite of himself. This kid’s gonna be just fine, if he can say it that confidently to someone he’s never met.

“So he’ll understand if you don’t want to do it. Hell, from what I hear, he doesn’t want to do it.”

“He does not. He is very angry. Not at me, at Toronto media.”

“Aren’t we all?” Kent snorts, “They did you a shit turn, Matty, but…there’s no shame in protecting yourself if you have to. Just don’t let it scare you completely.”

“Would you do it?” Matty asks, “For someone you love?”

Augustin closes his eyes, as if that would turn off his ears as well. Kent wants to tuck his head into his hoodie, pull the drawstrings, and never come back out, but Matty’s waiting patiently for an answer.

“I would do it for the right reason,” he finally decides to say, “I would do it because I wanted to, not because I had to.”

Augustin sighs, like he's been holding his breath for ages. He still has Kent’s free hand trapped between his own, cold palms pressing on either side of his knuckles. The other end of the line is so quiet that Kent can hear the sound of a kettle whistling in the background. Kendra and her tea.

“I’m gonna do it,” Matty says abruptly.

His fingers tighten around the phone, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Because you are right, about doing it for the right reasons. I am doing it because I love him.”

“Well,” Kent says, feeling something deflate in his chest and relieve the bottled-up pressure, “Whatever you do, kid, you can call me anytime. Seriously, I mean it. Anytime.”

“All of my teammates are going to be so jealous,” Matty says, and Kent can hear the grin through the phone. “Me, on speaking terms with Kent Parson. How awesome is that? So sick.”

He’s got a good handle on English slang, that’s for sure. Kent can hear Shetty laughing in the background as he hangs up.

Augustin is still curled on the couch, a firm weight against Kent’s side. He doesn’t seem very intent on moving, and to be honest, Kent’s not very intent on moving him, either. All the anger has been sucked out of him like poison from a snakebite, and now his bones feel like sludge.

“Do you want to stay the night?” he asks. Augustin looks up at him, and for a moment Kent thinks he’ll make an excuse to leave, but then Kit leaps up and settles on his chest.

“Is that okay?” He says instead, fingers gliding through her fur.

“Yeah,” Kent says, voice more of a croak. Neither of them move much for the rest of the day. Augustin falls asleep on the couch, and Kent doesn’t wake him up. The left side of the bed is cold when he wakes up in the morning, but Augustin’s still in his apartment, hood obscuring his hair, all tangled up in one of Kent’s mom’s knit blankets with his glasses on the coffee table and face pressed to the couch cushions.

It all has to start somewhere. Here, it starts with him making enough coffee for two people, and sliding Augustin’s favourite mug across the kitchen island once Augustin drags himself upright. Augustin comes to collect it and stares at him as he cleans the coffee pot. Kent’s sure that he looks like a storm cloud is hovering above his head. He’s always intense, but this is a whole different level that even he’s never experienced before.

“What?” he finally snaps. He regrets it almost immediately, but Augustin doesn’t seem offended. He reaches out and pokes Kent on the cheek.

“If the wind changes, your face is going to freeze that way.”

Kent bats his hand away, struggling not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Man, fuck you. Come on, we have an optional skate in an hour, and your neutral-zone positioning needs work.”

At that, Augustin looks outraged, “No the fuck it doesn’t!”

Two days later, Andrew Cooley comes out as bisexual and Matej Kaminsky comes out as gay in front of a thousand flashing lights, with the Schooners' core standing right behind them. Kent watches on his TV after the Aces matinee game against Tampa.

“I am not ashamed of my sexuality,” Cooley says, squinting into the light, “I am who I am, I love who I love, and I have never wanted to change that. Our privacy was violated against our will, and I can’t change that either, now.”

Kent hugs a pillow to his chest as Cooley looks down at his cue cards, and his brow contorts. The shaking hands holding the piece of paper fold in on themselves as Cools looks back up.

“I wish we didn’t live in a world where I felt the need to keep this to myself,” Cools says, and in the corner of the screen, the PR representative exchanges a wary look with Engstrom. “But we do. For the sake of my career, and so-called locker room cohesion, this is something I’ve kept to myself for a long time.” He takes a shuddering breath. “But I’m here now, with a team who does support me no matter what. I’m very lucky that way, because not many teams would. But I hope someday it doesn’t have to be lucky. Maybe things will start to change, and we can all just play.”

Beside him, Matty is smiling proudly as Cools finishes, “I hope they do change. Thank you.”

Kent doesn’t realize he hasn’t breathed until his phone rings.

“Did you see that?” Augustin asks quietly when he picks up.

“Yeah. I saw it,” he replies. The press conference has cut away to game highlights, like what just happened doesn’t matter at all. He sees his second goal of their matinee among the clips, as if the channel is trying to erase the conference from sight and mind entirely, but he’ll be hearing it for days. “He’ll be hearing it from his PR department.”

“Who gives a fuck?” Augustin says, voice halting, “He knows they’re going to come after him, and he did it anyway. Putain.”

He hangs up before Kent can say anything else. He exchanges a look with Kit, whose pearly blue eyes, bless her heart, are as empty as a Sabres home game, and gets up to unlock the door.

Ten minutes later, Augustin doesn’t knock before he comes in. Kent’s already standing in the foyer—he could hear the keys jangling in the hallway, and the sound of them jostling the lock. He leans against the kitchen island as Augustin kicks off his shoes. The door shuts and locks with a snap as he crosses the room.

He’s not wearing his glasses, Kent notices idly, almost out-of-body as Augustin walks towards him. He should wear them more often.

“Kent?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m still scared,” Augustin says, and leans down to kiss him.

The marble edge of the island digs into his back until Augustin places his hands between his body and stone. It’s nothing like the other night, when everything was quick and breathless. Augustin kisses him like they have all the time in the world, as slowly and methodically as he pores over game clips and his strategy notebooks. It’s thorough and careful, but ends all too quickly.

“Um,” Kent says, unable to open his eyes. There’s a pressure against his forehead, Augustin’s nose brushing his, “Does this mean you’re going to stay?”

A sigh brushes his mouth lightly, and he draws back. “Sorry, you don’t-”

Augustin’s fingers wind through the hair at the back of his head, “I don’t know yet,” he replies quietly, “But if someone’s going to…to take a fucking picture of us and put it on the internet, I want there to be something worth writing about. Besides, I can’t let a twenty-one-year-old have more balls than me. That’s fucking embarrassing.”

Kent laughs in spite of himself, “Yeah, a little bit.”

He comes from a household that can’t stand loose ends. It’s a literal metaphor: his mom can’t stop a knitting project once she’s started, and she taught her children the same lessons, that everything ought to be tied up neatly. But if he only has twenty-nine games of good hockey left before he and Augustin are on opposite sides of a face-off again, he’s not going to waste it on being scared of what happens after.

“Do that again.” Don’t ever stop.

Augustin complies, leaning back in and capturing his mouth.

He stays the night, this time in Kent’s bed. There’s no frenzy, no underlying anger or desperation, no darkness like every other time they’ve done this. Kent remembers it all clearly: the elegant arch of Augustin’s neck and long languid lines of his back, his stuttering breaths as he struggles to retain control of his own body, the way he laughs when their teeth accidentally click together. He’s always thought that all of Beth’s books were full of shit, works of fucking fiction. He’s never been glad to be wrong before.

“Crisse,” Augustin whispers against his skin, “tu vas me tuer et je pense que je te laisserais faire.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Kent pants in return, half out of his mind, “But if you ever stop, I will literally throw you out the window, I’m not kidding.”

Augustin’s voice is as amused as it is breathless, “Tu parles vraiment autant pendant l'amour.”

It's so late that it's early when they're finally finished. Kent's head is nestled in the curve of Augustin's shoulder when Augustin sleepily says, "I meant it when I said it that night. I just want you to know that."

I love you. "Say it again."

Augustin's voice is feather-soft. "Je t'aime, Kent Parson."

Kent's never heard that in French, but he knows what it means all the same. "If you sign with Winnipeg...we can make it work. I'll fly up, you'll fly down, we'll see each other as much as we can. I want to try."

He feels Augustin smile against his hair as he weaves fingers through Kent's cowlicks, flicking each one gently. "You'll have to learn how to lose to me."

Kent jerks his head up and narrows his eyes, "Who said I'd be the one losing, asshole?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, what colour is your Olympic medal again? Oh, wait-"

For that, Kent hits him with a pillow until he cries out for mercy, and they fall asleep tangled together under the sheets.

The next morning, when they arrive at the rink together, Kent tells Augustin to go ahead, and waits until he’s entered the practice rink before he pulls out his phone. Jenny picks up on the first ring.

“What did you do?” She asks. For a brief, stupid moment, he thinks she means what he did last night, and it takes him a couple of seconds to realize how preposterous that notion is.

“Um, hello to you too?”

Her voice is impatient, “Okay, what are you going to do?”

“Should I be worried or offended that you pick up so quickly when I call?”

“Kent,” Jenny’s voice is simultaneously sharp and weary, “Please put me out of my goddamn misery.”

“I’m going to come out to my team,” he says, and just lets the sentence hang there so he can get a proper look at it. He finds that the sight of it isn’t as ugly and awful as he thought it would be.

Jenny’s silent for a couple of seconds, before she says, “Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“Kent, you just told me that you’re going to tell your friends that you’re gay,” Jenny’s voice is as dry as the desert. “In other news, people age as they get older. What do you want me to do about that? Hold a press conference in the Aces dressing room? Make some NDAs for every member of your team?”

He stumbles through his jumbled thoughts, “I just thought- you know, contract negotiations with the head office-”

“And when you tell the head office that you’re gay, then I’ll appreciate the heads up,” Jenny’s voice is that incredibly specific type of New York sympathetic that doesn’t sound sympathetic at all, “Kid, you play professional sports. Those are your co-workers, but they’re also your friends. You either trust them or you don’t.”

“Right,” Kent stows his free hand in his pocket awkwardly, “So…good talk?”

“Uh huh,” Jenny says, “I assume the Andrew Cooley situation was a bit of a catalyst for you?”

“...No.”

“Uh huh,” she repeats, and it almost sounds like she’s laughing at him, “Are there any situations you’ll be in like that?”

“Not that I know of,” he says, and she sighs.

“Well, I haven't sued anyone into the ground in a while. Augustin Berenger’s agent gets all the fun, threatening Deadspin like that.” She sounds almost disappointed about Kent’s lack of sordid gay trysts, “Anyways, don’t get into any trouble, and if you do, make sure you do something fun and illicit so that I can get something out of it.”

“Sure. You got it.”

He gets half-dressed before doing it. Having his skates on always makes him that much more confident. Maybe it’s the extra height, or the literal blades on his feet, but there’s a kind of bravado he only has in hockey gear that is irreplicable anywhere else.

“Listen up,” he says, and the dressing room falls silent, “I know you guys probably saw what happened with Cooley and Kaminsky over the weekend. I want to make it clear that I have faith that none of you are going to be little shit-disturbers, but if any of you turn out to be-” he almost says the word ‘closeted’ and has to stop himself, “-sleeper shit-disturbers, I’m not kidding, I’ll report you to management. Got it?”

There’s a general murmur of assent, and the few problems that Kent was anticipating mumble something similar, albeit begrudgingly. The Aces aren’t perfect by any means. Harley, their fourth-line center Matthew Buckley, and Ruben aren’t exactly supportive; especially Buck, whose family is from the Bible Belt and has been giving him an earful about it since Jack came out. But even he just nods, though not without a little bit of an eyeroll.

“Good,” Kent says, and then before he can decide against it, “If any of you actually had a problem, that would make playing with me really difficult.”

Some people don’t even notice what he’s said at first, but then Jeff’s head shoots up like a bloodhound that just caught a whiff of deer, and Cross’ mouth opens with an audible noise. Kent sits back down beside Augustin, who just keeps tying his skates as if nothing has happened. He braces himself for a reaction, but all Augustin does is look up at him with a considering face.

“Smooth,” he says, giving his laces a yank. He’s smiling, and kicks out a foot to knock against Kent’s skate, “Very smooth.”

“I think so,” Kent replies as the rest of the dressing room catches onto what he’s putting down. He riffles through his things for his elbow pads, calmly strapping them on as his team struggles to find the right things to say. Cross looks like he’s torn between an outright lecture on gay rights and some sort of platitude about special journeys, Linsky’s staring into space like he’s doing complex physics equations in his head, and Allie’s bouncing in his seat, but he’s always bouncing, so that could be about anything.

The dead silence is interrupted by Scraps flat-out laughing so hard that he’s in tears, “Oh man, oh dude, I owe Genie so much fucking money.”

Augustin’s laughing too, his shoulders shaking silently as he ties a neat, double-knotted bow, even though Cross is glaring at him. Kent can’t help but grin. Okay, so maybe it’s a little funny.

“Wait,” Smitty says, brow furrowing “So you’re- I mean, you just- you’re...”

“Gay,” Kent finishes dryly, pulling his shoulder pads over his head, “Flaming. A fruit.”

“A fruit,” Ruben mutters to himself, “I don’t know this term.”

“It’s outdated,” Flicker replies perfunctorily, like he’s trying to get a good grade in You Can Play, “I don’t think we’re allowed to say it. Or at least not call him one. Or something.”

“I can’t say fruit?” Ruben says sarcastically, and Smitty reaches out to smack him on the head.

“No, asshole, you just can’t call Parse a fruit.”

“Holy fuck,” Augustin says mildly, “It’s like watching the fucking Three Stooges.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and Kent gives him a knock on the shoulder. About eight conversations are happening at once, and none of them involve him, which is probably for the best. He just finishes getting dressed and swans out to let them decide among themselves what they’re going to do.

“Hey, Coach,” he says as he hits the ice, Augustin on his heels. Wilson squints at them when nobody else comes out (hah!) after them.

“Where’s the rest of you?”

“Who can say?” Augustin replies, doing lazy little circles around a set of scattered pucks, “We should be your favourites, though. Are we your favourites, coach?”

“You both talk too much,” Wilson says, but he’s clearly trying not to smile.

Practice is a disorganized affair. Swoops and Cross are going on a rampage around the ice, and Kent’s pretending he can’t hear what they’re saying. Part of him wants to jump in and stop it all, but the guys know both of them well enough to know that they’d do this for any of them, for any reason. Jeff swears them all to secrecy like they’re taking blood oaths, and even Buck agrees not to say anything, though probably more out of shame than anything else.

“I mean, like,” Petal is saying by the bench when they stop for water, “My sister’s bi, or whatever. It would be super weird if I, like, didn’t vibe with it. Also, she’d actually murder me.”

Flicker leans in, “Isn’t she, like, fifteen? Can’t you take her?”

“Yeah, so, she has zero regard for self-preservation, like, she does not give a fuck.”

“Even if we thought it was weird,” Smitty agrees, cowering slightly under Jeff’s narrowed gaze, “Which I don’t, by the way, it’s whatever. It’s his life.”

“Plus, it’s not like he’s one of those ga- ow!” Ruben yelps as Frisk smacks him on the fleshy, unprotected part of his calf with a stick. “What the fuck, dude?”

“Whoops,” Frisk says mildly, and for a minute Kent’s forced to question the closeness of his and Allie’s bond all over again before he remembers that both of them have girlfriends now, who happen to be twins, which is a whole other can of worms he’ll leave for Freud to open.

The Aces aren’t perfect, but they’re his team. He has to trust them fully, or else he’s the biggest hypocrite in the world.

“Hey,” he says to Jeff as they set up for a defensive zone drill, “Stop threatening people.”

“Cross told me to,” Jeff protests, but he’s grinning, “I just didn’t disagree. We just want you to be happy, honey.” He reaches out to pinch Kent’s cheek, and Kent swats him away with a laugh.

“Dude, at this point, they should call you two Mom and Dad.”

“Speaking of which, I’m guessing that the trial separation is over?” Jeff asks, propping his chin on the end of his stick. Across the ice, Augustin’s shooting pucks at the small circle of players, who dance from foot to foot trying to avoid the projectiles. There’s a look of abject glee on his face. Kent can’t help but smile.

There’s something to be said about the bravado that he feels in skates. Equipment is just padding, layers of plastic and fabric designed to keep his bones from breaking when a shot barrels into his chest at a hundred miles an hour. The skates and the stick are all that really matters. When he has them, he almost feels invincible.

He hopes Cooley and Kaminsky feel the same way one day.

“Yeah,” he says, “Yeah, it is."

Notes:

on a serious note, I vacillated on this chapter a lot. I knew I didn't want to out Kent or Augustin because it felt cheap, but I figured that Kent would have needed a pretty big push to finally reveal this part of himself. i tried to be as sensitive as I could, but i know it's almost impossible to be perfect. I'm not sure I love how this chapter turned out, but i've sort of accepted it for how it is. funny how that works

On an unserious note, if the oilers actually reverse sweep the panthers i'm going to cry-laugh because that's actually crazy. connor mcdavid is so good at hockey that it honest to god pisses me off

anyways, potential spin-off about matty and cools? i have ideas in my head...

Chapter 19

Summary:

in which Augustin has a boyfriend, a cross necklace, and a complicated relationship with his father

Playing in Montreal had several perks, but one of them was that it temporarily got rid of the Augustin-Has-An-Away-Game-In-Quebec-So-We-All-Have-To-See-Each-Other family dinners. He’s probably the only red-blooded Quebecois man outside of Montreal who doesn’t want the Nordiques to come back, because it means less time he has to sit across from his parents in a stuffy restaurant and let them strip him back down to fourteen years old. And by his parents, he means his dad.

His father is the kind of man one would imagine as raising two professional hockey players. He raised them strictly, but fairly: church every Sunday, practices four times a week, and the belt only when they had done something terrible, like throw their sister’s skates in the shinny pond. He’s a proud man who will take his tools to help re-shingle the neighbour’s roof without question but refuse a free lift into the city, and he can be found sitting in the front row of every game, every recital, and every school play his children are a part of. He’s fine with Anglophones as long as they speak French in Quebec, and he’s fine with gay people as long as they’re not his son.

Jean Berenger never graduated high school, but he was the one who waded through a pile of money-hungry agents to find Jerry, a man he knew would take care of his son almost as well as he could. He was the one who prepared Augustin for his draft interviews: “Don’t slouch. Look them in the eye. Smile often, but not all the time. You’re a smart boy, Augustin, but don’t appear like a know-it-all. Let’s try this again.”

Berengers don’t quit. They’re supposed to take the hits and get back up. If the roof caves in during a storm and insurance won’t cover the damage, you rebuild the roof yourself. If the pulp mill lays you off after twenty-five years of hard work, you find another job, and work nights to make sure you can afford new gear for your son and boarding fees for your daughter. All he asked in return was that his children do the same.

How do you tell a man like that that you’ve failed to learn the lessons he taught you? How do you tell a man like that that his efforts have all been for nothing? The answer is that you don’t. You let him think that you’re a spoiled disappointment, because the alternative is letting him think that you’re a coward and a failure.

Augustin came out to his father when he was eighteen years old, before training camp in Houston. He hadn’t thought it would be a big deal, since his father had never taken the tack of some of the other members of their congregation in thinking there was something wrong with the gays. It turns out that he was wrong.

They don’t talk about it anymore, but his father no longer looks him in the eye. Augustin used to be his dad’s pride and joy, tough and calculating, a man’s man’s favourite kind of hockey player. It only took one trade and one short conversation to erase all of that.

Now, Angelique is a better son than he is.

Which is why, when she calls to beg him for a favour the night before they get to Montreal, he’s inclined to say, “No.”

“Please,” Angelique’s voice is verging on desperate, “It will be so much easier to defend my choice in boyfriends to Mama if Kent is there to distract everyone.”

Augustin makes sure that the shower is still on in the bathroom before he says, “I am not bringing him to dinner, you can fucking forget it.”

“I’m bringing my boyfriend, so you have to bring yours. It’s the smart thing to do. Divide and conquer.”

He sucks at his teeth involuntarily, “We haven’t put a label on it yet.”

“Oh my God, do you hear yourself? Actually, whatever, I don’t care,” Angelique says hotly, “Bring him as your friend if you have to. Papa will be so busy fawning over him, even though he’s American, that Jeff and I will only have to deal with Mama.”

“Angie, if I bring Kent to dinner and tell Dad what we’re doing, it’s going to kill him. I think he will have a fucking heart attack and die. Do you want me to kill our father?”

“No, obviously not, but maybe a little non-fatal heart attack would be a good distraction-”

“Is that your sister?” Kent asks, coming out of the bathroom in only a pair of loose plaid boxers as he towels off his wet blond hair. “Hey, Angelique!”

“Put him on the phone,” Angelique hisses, “Put him on the phone!”

“I’m not fucking putting him on the phone,” Augustin says, though his voice comes out strangled when Kent sits down on his bed, and lifts the ice pack sitting on his knee that had gone warm about twenty minutes ago. The hand slowly trailing up his thigh isn’t helping matters at all. “And I’m not bringing him to dinner.”

“Soup-ey is dinner, right? What dinner?” Kent wonders as he presses a kiss to the inside of Augustin’s sore knee, and then one an inch higher, and then an inch higher than that. Augustin’s slowly losing his grip on reality.

“No dinner,” he says tightly, using his other foot to kick Kent onto the floor so that he can breathe normally. Kent sprawls dramatically across the hotel carpeting. “No dinner!”

“Augustin,” his sister says seriously in his ear, “If you don’t invite Kent to dinner, I’m going to tell Mama that you broke into the liquor cabinet, drank the wine she’s saving for her and Papa’s fiftieth anniversary, and replaced it with tea.”

“Hah! I replaced the bottle last Christmas, but nice fucking try.”

“Okay, then I’ll tell Papa that you stole Grandpere’s rifle and threw it into the pond and that’s why it doesn’t work anymore-”

If he could go back to his teenage self and tell the bastard to stop throwing things in the pond, he would. “Fuck, fuck, fine! I’ll do what you want!” he hisses, because his sister is the devil and his father loves that rifle like a third child, “Fuck, I hate you.”

“You love me. See you both tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at the hotel.”

Augustin hangs up and peers over the edge of the bed to where Kent is still sprawled on the floor with an exaggerated pout. “You kicked me.”

“How would you like to come to dinner with me and my sister tomorrow night?”

So maybe he buries the lede when he asks. Kent agrees immediately, and that’s when he springs the whole, “By the way, my parents will be there.”

The terrified look on Kent’s face has only ever been matched by little kids walking through their first haunted houses, but he doesn’t immediately make up an excuse. He’ll take what he can get.

There’s a bus to Montreal from Ottawa rather than a flight, and Kent sleeps with his head on Augustin’s shoulder for the whole two hours. Augustin looks out the window watching the highway signs turn from English into French, and feels a weight lift off his chest ever so slightly, only for a completely new one to settle in its place.

They’re both freaking out, which is unconducive to the whole fucking point of inviting Kent in the first place. Kent dresses down, because Augustin has complained about his restrictive upbringing more than he cares to admit, and walks out of the bathroom in a crisp white button down and navy-blue slacks.

“How do I look?” he asks, the least flashy of his watches affixed to his wrist as he rolls up his sleeves. Augustin turns to him as he adjusts the collar of his sweater, and tries his best to smile reassuringly.

“Repressed,” he says, “American.”

“Perfect,” Kent replies, grabbing his peacoat from the closet, “By the way, um…what do your parents think we are to each other?”

“Friends,” Augustin says, and tries not to wince at the thinly veiled disappointment in Kent’s eyes. Since Kent came out to the Aces, he feels as if he’s walking a tightrope. He thinks sometimes that he’s being too obvious, and he’s sure that some people—Jeff, Cross, and Smitty in particular—have lingering suspicions that Augustin’s not as straight as he lets everyone believe that he is.

But then there’s people like Buckley, who come up to him after practice and ask things like, “Does it get weird sharing a room with him? Is that why you guys stopped for a little bit?”

“Who, Kent? Nah, I was just going through some shit.” Augustin had replied, as patient and flat as he could as he finished stretching, “Is it weird sharing a shower with him?”

Buck turned red, but stammered. “I mean…but, like…you’re Catholic, right?”

Augustin was not exactly keen on discussing his relationship with father figures, heavenly or otherwise, but he said, “Yeah. What about it?”

“So, like, in the Bible-”

“Hockey’s not in the Bible,” Augustin says very seriously, and relents only when Buck makes a discontented noise, “Seriously, Buckley. He’s the same dude as he was last week. He just happens to be into guys instead of girls. As long as you don’t kiss a boy, I think you and God will be fine. If you can’t get over it, just pretend it never happened, because the rest of us are over it already.”

He’s sure that someone, somewhere would piss themselves if they heard him say that, but it works. Buck keeps his mouth shut, and starts treating Kent like he did before everything happened. Things have settled down, which is great, because Augustin’s not about to commit the strategic cardinal sin of fighting a war on two fronts.

Kent decides to wait outside for fresh air, which in March in Montreal is less fresh and more freezing. Augustin waits inside the lobby, rubbing his palms together. He hasn’t seen his father since Christmas, when they fought over his trade out of Montreal.

“I just don’t understand why this keeps happening,” his father had grunted, eyes on the road instead of on his son, and Augustin was trapped in the shotgun seat like a bug being pinned open for display, “Are you going to re-sign with the Aces if they offer a contract extensions?”

“I don’t know, Papa. It depends on what the contract is. I’ll take a pay cut for a no-trade clause, but Jerry thinks I should aim higher.”

“He’s right. If you play well enough, and try to get along, they won’t have any reason to trade you.”

“Right,” Augustin had muttered, en Anglais so that his father wouldn’t reply. “Of course.”

“Hey loser, what’s got you looking like that?”

His sister smiles down at him, her least favourite purse draped over her shoulder. She’s all dressed up in clothes that their mother bought her which don’t suit her at all: a knee-length navy silk skirt, sheer stockings and short black heels with a large buckle like a schoolgirl’s, and an austere blouse. Her hair is free and loose in ringlets, and she scratches the back of her neck awkwardly. They’re both playing parts today.

“Where’s Jeff?”

“Outside,” she hums, crossing her arms, “I told him to meet me out there. I wanted to make sure you didn’t chicken out first. Speaking of, where’s your boy?”

“Kent’s waiting outside too,” he says, offering her his arm, “We might as well go get them.”

She takes it with a sigh, and they walk out of the hotel to find Kent and Jeff glaring at each other on the curb.

“What are you doing here?” Kent is asking. Jeff is wearing the most normal clothing that Augustin’s ever seen on his body, and yet has truly never looked more suspicious in his life.

“What are you doing here?”

“I asked first.”

“Well, I’m older.”

“Well, I’m the captain.”

“Well, I’ve been in the show longer than you.”

“Well-”

“You know,” Augustin says to Angie, who’s struggling not to laugh. “On second thought, maybe we should just leave them here to finish jerking each other off.”

He feels gratified when Angelique exiles Kent and Jeff to the backseat of her rental car to work out their differences, partly because he’s about to throw up and being in the passenger seat helps, and partly because their backseat bickering is distracting enough to keep him from thinking about how he’s about to introduce a boy to his parents.

He never thought that this was ever going to happen. There was never supposed to be a boyfriend to introduce. Sebastien had never met his parents, and after that ended, he was sure that nobody ever would. He’s never had a chance to plan it out, to run over the idea of it in his head. There are no proper exit strategies, no way to flip this back on his opponent. There’s not supposed to be opponents at all, it’s a fucking family dinner.

He takes a deep breath in. They’re just friends tonight. Hopefully, Kent is shiny and novel enough that his mother doesn’t pry into his presence.

The restaurant is the same one as always, an old steakhouse that his father could never have dreamt of affording when he and Angie were kids, and can barely afford now. While Kent and Jeff sign autographs for a couple of kids waiting in the foyer with their parents, Augustin has to pull aside the hostess and give her his credit card before he lets her escort them to the table.

She pushes it away at first, “I’m not supposed to-”

“Listen, my dad’s gonna put up a fight when I try to pick up the bill, and he’s going to bring the waiter into it,” Augustin tells her gravely, “I promise that this is better for everyone. Just take the card, please.”

He also ends up giving her a shiny red fifty, which makes her much more amenable to the request.

His gut turns over as they’re escorted towards their table. People recognize him and Angelique up here pretty often, but with Kent and Jeff in tow, it feels like the entire restaurant is watching them walk towards the table in the back where his parents are sitting. He sees Jeff take Angelique’s hand and lets out a sharp exhale against his will, to clear the clenching of his lungs. Kent looks over at him at the sound. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t show it.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says, flashing his cocksure, charming smile, “Parents love me.”

Augustin nods and makes sure he takes his cross necklace out from beneath the collar of his shirt before his mother rushes around the table to hug him tightly. It’s always nice at the beginning. He hugs her back as tightly as he can, and remembers how much he misses her, “Hi, Mama.”

“August,” she kisses both his cheeks and his nose is filled with the familiar smell of her perfume and the air freshener that she makes his father keep in the pickup. “You get more handsome every time I see you. The TV, it washes you out so much.”

“It’s just the rink lights,” Augustin says, hyperaware of Angelique nervously introducing Jeff to their father. Jeff’s unflappability is a gift: he shakes hands with a polite grin and greets their father in French rather than English.

“It is good to meet you, sir, he says too formally, with a hopelessly Anglophone accent, but given that he’s from Toronto, it’s enough to subvert their father’s low expectations. Angelique nods along as he continues, “I am Jeffrey Troy. How are you?”

Kent’s got a look of unrestrained malicious glee on his face as Jeff butchers the French language, and Augustin knows that this is going to be chirp material for the next three weeks at least. Still, it works.

“It is nice to meet you too, Jeffrey. Good to see that one of my children finally brings someone back home to meet us,” his father says, shaking Jeff’s hand firmly, “I was beginning to lose hope, but Angelique’s always, what’s the term…pulled through for me. Just like in Korea!”

“A third gold medal,” Jeff agrees in English, looking relieved, “You must be running out of space on your wall.”

“August,” his mother says, and he realizes that he’s squeezing her hands too hard, “Mind your manners, I taught you better. Go greet your father and introduce your guest.”

Kent’s been lurking behind him, and Augustin realizes that the spot of warmth on his back is the press of his hand as he waits patiently for Augustin to introduce him. As if he needs any introduction; everyone’s been looking at him since he walked in.

“Papa,” Augustin says through a tense smile, and his father finally looks up at him. The dark eyes are as lukewarm as always. “It’s good to see you.”

“Augustin,” his father replies. They shake hands, and Augustin’s well aware of just how much more calloused his father’s palm is than his own. Soft. He can see Angelique biting her lip nervously as he brings Kent forward, and his father’s face lights up at the sight of Rimouski legend Kent Parson. He’s fine with it. It’s fine.

“Hello, Mr. Berenger, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kent says with that easy grin of his, “I’m sorry, I didn’t have a chance to learn any French.”

“Mama,” Augustin says, “Papa, this is Kent Parson-”

“We know who he is,” his father says, shaking Kent’s hand jovially, “You’re well on your way to another Art Ross, eh? What a season you’ve been having!”

“-my boyfriend.”

His father drops Kent’s hand like a hot stone.

“Finally,” Jeff says. Angelique elbows him, and he follows up with, “I mean, what?”

In the moments before he realizes the gravity of what he’s just done, Augustin can’t help the little thrill of victory he feels at the utter shock in both of his parents’ eyes. It only took about twenty-six years for him to have the upper hand at a family dinner table. He smiles, “Should we sit? Here, Mom.”

He pulls out her chair, and she all but falls into it. His father rounds the table to sit opposite from her, and Augustin sits in the chair beside his mother before Angelique can claim it.

It hits him like a truck the second that he’s no longer vertical: What the fuck have I just done?

They all sit down, and Angelique stares at him like he’s lost his goddamn mind. She kicks his shin under the table. He kicks her back. The waitress comes by to take their drink orders before anyone can say anything else, and he resolves to tip her so much money that she can afford to quit her job as his father interrogates her about their beer selection.

He can’t really breathe. An elbow jabs into his ribs and air floods his brain as he inhales sharply.

“You couldn’t have given me a heads up?” Kent mutters, his vivid grey-green eyes almost yellow in the orange light of the candles and chandeliers. Augustin feels his face flush.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I just…”

“Gus,” Kent says, folding their hands together under the table. He offers a gentle but tenuous smile, which is probably more than Augustin deserves. “It’s fine.”

It’s not fine, but it’s already happened. They’re still in a restaurant surrounded by people, so their hands are concealed by the table linens, but he weaves his fingers through Kent’s and everything seems just a tiny bit more manageable.

“Just water, please,” he tells the waitress, who disappears soon after. The table is dead silent. His mother is glaring at his father, Jeff and Kent are having some sort of silent conversation with just their eyes, and his father is having a staring contest with his napkin.

Hey, at least he’s not having a heart attack.

“So,” Angelique says, raising her eyebrows at him. He wrinkles his nose. Isn’t this exactly what she wanted? Nobody’s going to give a fuck about Jeffrey Troy and his turtle-patterned ties at this point. He could wear a clown nose and boat shoes and their mother probably wouldn’t even notice, “Seen any good movies lately?”

Kent laughs at that, and it breaks enough of the tension that Augustin’s mother flies into interrogation mode. She’s utterly ruthless about questions. The last time Angelique brought a boy home, she was sixteen and the kid left in tears. Luckily, neither Jeff nor Kent are sixteen, and they have years of media training on their side.

Kent’s witty enough to carry them through drinks and into dinner, and other than the eyebrow wiggles when neither of his parents are looking, Jeff’s largely behaving himself. Augustin feels his lungs unclench ever so slightly as his mother warms quickly to both of them. She even lets them call her Manon.

“Your sister’s at Princeton?” she asks Kent over her salad. She still orders at restaurants as she did two decades ago, when he and Angelique had to share a meal and nobody could order dessert. Always the second-cheapest thing on the menu, because ordering the cheapest was too desperate. “How wonderful. Augustin and Angelique both almost went there, but Angelique hates orange.”

“That’s not why I didn’t go to Princeton,” Angelique says hastily, eyebrow ticking at their mother’s slight at her so-called frivolous fashion sense. “I just don’t like school much. Augustin’s always been the smart one.”

“I can imagine Augustin in college.” Kent says, grinning warmly, “He definitely studies hard enough.”

“We’re hardworking,” his father replies shortly, sawing at his steak. It’s some of the first words that he’s spoken since Augustin dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of the table. “And Augustin’s a clever boy, smarter than me by a mile without a doubt. He gets it from his mother.”

He means it sincerely, and yet Augustin braces himself. It doesn’t often take long for the other shoe to drop when it comes to his dad.

“So, August, that was an…interesting article that came out last month.”

Yup, that’s about right.

“Papa,” he snaps. It’s always like this. His father is old, he’s as stubborn as a goat, and having two children excel at the sport he loves has made him proud in the seven deadly sins sense. Where else would Augustin get it from? “Can we please talk about this when we don’t have guests?”

“Yes, please, Dad,” Angelique agrees, “The article wasn’t even true, so can we please just let it go?”

“Well,” his father says sternly, “maybe if he did not leave so often, not so many people would have believed it, eh?”

Beside him, Kent stiffens, mouth closing into a tight media smile that’s as bright as a spotlight. Augustin doesn’t even want to know what Jeff looks like. He feels as stupid and young as he did when he was a kid sulking in the backseat as his father lectured him on all the things that he got wrong during his peewee games. He loves his father, and he knows that his father loves him like nothing else, except his sister. He just wonders, sometimes, whether his father likes him.

“Jean,” his mother says tightly, “Not at the dinner table, please.”

He can feel his teeth grinding, every bite from his half-eaten plate of fish like sawdust in his mouth. Kent’s rubbing a gentle circle into his knee with a thumb, but that’s only placating half of the problem.

“When should I talk about it?” his father hisses, “When he doesn’t call for months? When I learn where he signs from his agent, and not from my own son’s mouth? Or when he comes home or goes to Europe because no team will sign him here? For years, I have let him squander his talent as he bounces from city to city. If he had just stayed with the Aeros in the first place-”

“Dad,” Angelique snaps, “Seriously, that’s enough.”

Augustin can’t help it. He shakes his head with a dry, humourless laugh. Maybe he’s a bad son. Maybe he doesn’t call as often as he should, or visit when he can. He wasn’t there to help rebuild the roof, or drain the basement when it flooded. He’s never brought hockey’s Holy Grail back home for his father to hold and know that all the money and time that he sacrificed was worth it.

“And now he’s got a…a friend, and he sprang it on us! I didn’t raise you this way, Augustin.”

“My boyfriend,” he snaps, because he can’t handle talking about how his father thinks he’s a coward and a failure, but he sure as hell can get up in arms about his personal life choices, “He’s my boyfriend, Dad. We’re dating. Are you ashamed of that?”

“No, I am not ashamed of that. You can…date whoever you like.”

“Then why can’t you look me in the eye?”

His father looks up from his plate. They have the same eyes, upturned and crinkled in the corners, dark until sunlight hits them. Augustin wants to ask him how to fix this, but there’s no way to fix this without cutting some part of himself off, and he has nothing left to spare.

And yet, family is family. He spears a green bean and places it in his mouth. It tastes of nothing, and he says, en Anglais, “How’s the pulp mill doing?”

“Downsized again,” his father says in the same faultlessly polite tone, as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened at all. And they continue on.

He orders the dessert that he knows his mother would like most and then asks her to finish it for him after one bite. Jeff quietly receives his father’s seal of approval when he goes on a thorough tangent about his hatred for the Boston Bruins, and his mother’s acceptance when she learns about his charity work. Angelique looks as if she’s about to collapse in relief.

They fawn over Kent, because who wouldn’t? But it’s not the same, and Augustin knows it.

Predictably, his father makes a fuss when they set the bill down in front of Augustin, with the added fuss of having to step on Kent’s foot to keep him from offering to pay. As previously discussed, Angelique has stolen Jeff’s wallet to prevent him from doing the same. Somehow, Augustin manages to sign the cheque without dying or being killed and bundles everyone into the cold Montreal air before the heat of the restaurant threatens to choke him alive.

“See you after the game tomorrow, Mama,” he says as Angelique calls a taxi. His mother smiles up at him, patting his arm.

“I like him,” she says, leaning up to kiss his cheek. Augustin looks over his shoulder to where Kent is chatting with Jeff and his father, his breath coming in silver puffs and cheeks rosy from the cold.

With too much hope, he says, “You do?”

“Don’t mind your father, August,” she pats his cheek as the taxi pulls up, “He’s a stubborn mule, but he wants what’s best for you. We both do. And I don’t know much about…that sort of thing, but I know that boy looks at you like you deserve to be looked at, my little bear.”

It’s the worst thing in the world to call him, unless it’s his mother doing it. She pinches his cheek one more time before getting into the taxi, and his father follows with a short farewell. The headlights disappear into the Montreal traffic, and the cool air that floods his brain with oxygen nearly knocks him flat on his back.

“I’m going to walk back,” he tells Angelique, pulling his gloves out of his coat pocket. He needs to get the frenetic energy out of his body that’s pulsing through his nerves like a livewire, or he won’t sleep tonight. Angelique pats him on the cheek where their mother did the same.

“Don’t die,” she says unsympathetically, and slides into her car, “Come on, Troy!”

“Duty calls,” Jeff says, patting Augustin on the shoulder with a sympathetic smile, “See you back at the hotel. You coming, Parse?”

“Third-wheeling?” Kent snorts, “Fat fucking chance. I’ll walk too.”

Jeff looks a little too excited about that. Augustin watches them drive away, and Kent says, “Oh, they’re totally having sex in the rental car.”

“Oh my God, don’t ever say that to me about my sister,” Augustin has to close his eyes, “I will put your tiny ass in a snowbank, holy fuck, I have to pour acid into my ears now.”

“Aw, good little Catholic boy, can’t talk about sex without turning red,” Kent flicks his cross pendant, which flashes in the light, “I didn’t know that you still practiced.”

“Only on Christmas, Easter, and when I feel especially guilty,” he replies as they set off down the street, “And sometimes Lent, if I don’t forget. If you make a Catholic schoolgirl joke, I’m going to commit to celibacy.”

“No fun,” Kent mutters, crestfallen, “So…uh…about tonight-”

“What?” Augustin snaps, shoving his hands into his pockets. He can pretend his cheeks are red from the cold rather than embarrassment, but that's not going to fool anyone, “You want to hear about my daddy issues?”

Kent glares hotly at him, “Actually, I want to know if I can tell my mom that we’re dating, since you decided to roll under the fucking bus and drag me with you. Or is it just you who gets to spring me on your parents so that you can one-up your dad?”

His stomach sinks. They go a block and a half in silence before he quietly mutters, “I’m sorry. Me and my dad…it’s just like that sometimes.”

Kent takes a few more steps before he replies, “Your parents really don’t know what happened with the Aeros, do they?”

He doesn’t say that Kent wouldn’t understand, even though the sentiment dances on the tip of his tongue. His father lets himself be laid off every five years, and then scrapes his way back to his job through blood, sweat, and tears as if the act of grinding his bones to dust brings him some sort of honour. He would have told Augustin to stick it through, because that’s what Berengers do. They don’t give up. “No, they don’t.”

Kent’s uncharacteristic silence is indicative of what he thinks, and the way that he bites the inside of his cheek is indicative of how badly he wants to say it. Augustin feels the familiar, dark nudge of fear in his stomach, and struggles to suppress it. “Just fucking say it.”

He expects chastisement. He doesn’t receive it.

“When Jack…” Kent’s lips almost disappear, “I didn’t tell my mom that I was the one who found him for six months. She found out from Alicia Zimmermann. And I think that broke her heart, a little bit.”

He says it clinically, the words spiralling silver into the cold air. Augustin couldn’t count the number of times he’s made this trek alone, muscle memory carrying him over the salt-strewn pavement, but Kent stumbles over the frozen ridges of snow and slips on patches of ice. He reaches out a hand to steady him.

“She’s my mom, you know?” Kent continues, gripping Augustin’s coat for the barest moment before his hands retreat into his pockets. “I just…everything she’s done in her life has been for me. It was the least that I owed her, but I was fucking ashamed that I didn’t get there in time. I thought it was my fault. I didn’t want her to have to comfort me about it.”

Thought. The difference is so negligible, but so vast at the same time. “What are you getting at, Parson?”

“Tell your mom, Augustin,” Kent says gravely as they get closer to the hotel and its thousand golden lights, “You don’t have to. I won’t ask again. But she’s your mom, and if she finds out from someone other than you, that’ll kill her more than anything you could ever tell her.”

Augustin stops him with a hand on his arm. Kent looks as if he’s bracing himself for something as Augustin tugs him casually into the shadow of a concrete pillar holding up the awning of a small covered square. People spill out of the nearby Metro station, so intent on their destinations that none of them notice the two men in the darkness who will fill their television screens tomorrow.

“What?” Kent says belligerently, teeth flashing in the light. “Gonna kill me with no witnesses? Because I can fight. I'm scrappy.”

I love you, Augustin thinks. “Tell your mom.”

“What?”

He takes his glove off and weaves his fingers through Kent’s, bringing his cold, red knuckles to his mouth. It’s cheesy as all hell, the kind of thing he used to point and laugh at when he was younger, that made everyone smile all cryptically and say things like just you wait.

He’s waited so long.

Kent flushes, his grin sharp as a skate blade. “Tell my mom what, Gus?”

Augustin drops another short kiss, just because he can, and passes his gloves to Kent because Kent’s hands are freezing. Kent puts them on without a fuss, and they keep walking, their shoulders a careful, measured three inches apart.

When they get back to the hotel room, Kent locks and deadbolts the door before he says, “Can I say something about the necklace now?”

“Depends on what it is.”

Kent grins devilishly and asks innocently, “Wear it and nothing else?”

“Oh my God, you are fucking insufferable,” Augustin replies, but his tone is negated by the fact that he’s taking his shirt off as quickly as possible.

The next morning, Kent leaves him to sleep in, which is kind of him, and wakes him up for lunch by yanking him off of the bed by his ankles, which isn’t. They all sit at the table and chirp Jeff, who has a massive purple splotch high on his neck, and Augustin wears a high-collared shirt to hide his own marks.

Montreal is always a mixed bag for him. The crowd loves him, because he loves this city, and he has loved their team since he could conceive of hockey. He used to dream about wearing red and blue, and for a year and a half, he did. He took them to the top of the Atlantic Division, and he had really, honestly tried.

And they traded him anyway.

The Centre Bell used to feel like a third home, and now it feels like a haunted house as he walks through the visitors tunnel. There’s ghosts in this arena: once a year, his father drove him and Angelique down to watch the Habs play. Always the cheapest tickets for the visiting teams nobody wanted to watch, so high up that the grainy television at home provided a better view of the ice. His young, carefree self haunts these rafters. His relationship with his father lives here in hazy memories.

Les Habitants. The people who live here. He’s not one of them anymore.

“Are you okay?” Smitty asks him as he lines his eyes for the game. Augustin looks at him in the mirror, wondering what about him looks any worse than usual, so noticeable that Smitty’s the one who comes to ask him that question instead of Kent or Jeff.

“Why?”

“I’m on Twitter a lot,” Smitty says, half-dressed and leaning against the wall. His voice is quiet, discreet, “So, you should know that someone took a video of you with your parents last night. And, like…you didn’t look super jazzed.”

“Ah,” Augustin says shortly, blinking at his reflection. He doesn’t do the eyeliner for looks, but he can’t help but admire what it does to him, sometimes. It makes him look angry, and unafraid. “Yeah, I’m good, Smitty. Dads, you know?”

“Yeah,” Smitty laughs, rubbing the back of his neck, “My dad still doesn’t understand hockey, so, you know…Thanksgivings are weird. Anyways, I just wanted to make sure you were good.”

“I’m good,” Augustin repeats, and finds that it’s mostly sincere. Smitty knocks him on the shoulder with a grin, and bounds away.

When he gets out on the ice, he forgoes his helmet for the warm-up. Cold air whistles through his hair as he skates, the lights bare down on the top of his head. He makes polite conversation with a few of the Canadiens at center ice, and finds that even though he’s wearing black and silver, he feels less like an intruder. They ruffle his hair as everyone leaves the ice, and he adjusts his headband in the tunnel as the music thrums through the floor and into his bones.

They don’t talk much, he and his father. When they do, it’s about hockey. They speak in symbols and metaphors. His father apologizes by retaping his stick, or carefully stitching closed the fraying cuffs of his jersey, or going out to the shinny pond earlier than sunrise and shovelling it clear. Augustin makes amends by scoring goals.

He gets one in the first period, and watches the replay of his dad leaping out of his seat on the jumbotron during the commercial break. His fists are held high in the air, his perennial puffy vest and red plaid flannel easy to see amid a sea of red and blue as he cheers louder than anyone in a hundred-foot radius. His mother is wearing his jersey: not his Aces one, or a Habs one, or even his Rouyn Noranda jersey that he left in the closet. It’s his minor hockey jersey from the year before he was drafted into the Q. Berenger, number 7.

Sometimes, people speculate why he wears number seven. Angelique’s number is easier to guess; 24, born on February 4th. She’s simple in all the ways that he is complicated. He usually just shrugs when they ask. Why does it matter? A number is a number.

Seven is the number of days per week that his father used to work so that Augustin could play the game he loves more than anything else. He chose it when he realized why his dad didn’t come home until the early hours of the morning, and left before the sun rose, dark circles permanently etched under his eyes.

Children aren’t meant to owe their parents anything, but Augustin still thinks that he owes his father everything.

He scores another goal early in the third, and his skin itches and writhes. He wants that third goal. Maybe this one will be enough.

“Your dad looks pretty happy,” Smitty says as the third line hops onto the ice after an offside. He looks up to see his father cheering the latest Aces goal. It takes so much for him to cheer for anyone other than the Habs. Only his kid can do it.

They’re winning 3-2, but he’s chasing that final goal. The Canadiens play tight, good defence, but he manages to nab the puck off of the boards towards the end of the third. The lights are bright and moony, the ice flat and wide as the surface of a lake. Perfect conditions.

The goalie is looking right at him, body hugging the post, so the puck won’t go in from this angle. It’s a shame that he can’t control everything.

“Berenger cycles, drops it to Smith, who shoots- SCORES! A beautiful goal by Devon Smith! The Calder nominee has his first four-point game here in Montreal, and the score is 4-2 with forty-five seconds left in the third!”

He doesn’t end up back on the ice after that shift.

Their flight leaves tomorrow morning, and Kent gets looped into going out with the team to celebrate their victory. Augustin bows out cleanly, “I have to go see my parents before I go.”

“You’re the only one who can order in French,” Bloom says, “Come on, please?”

“Uh, am I fucking chopped liver?” Cross yells across the room. Augustin shakes his head. Cross’ version of French is raw and chopped up, only really suited to spitting insults. The waiters will all switch to English when he tries anything more complex than asking for a table.

“Man, let him go,” Smitty says, the team top hat sitting akimbo on his curly hair, “Parse, don’t even think about trying to wriggle out!”

“Why does Augustin get to wriggle out?”

Smitty waves the top hat like he’s waving goodbye to the Titanic, “Because Gus gave me an assist on my goal, and you gave me jack-shit!”

Augustin escapes while Kent fights a losing battle with a rookie.

His parents always stay in the same hotel, one that they refuse to let him pay for even though he could put them in a place ten times as nice. It’s the kind of place where he doesn’t need to give his name to the concierge, just walks in and hits the elevator button for their floor.

Why is he here? The elevator groans slowly upwards, and his palms sweat. Why is he here? It feels like surrender, like cowardice, to take someone else’s advice. He’s twenty-five, about to be twenty-six, and he’s supposed to know what’s best for himself by now. His prefrontal cortex is fully developed. He is his own man, beholden to the whims of nobody.

Cowardice can come in all forms. He just has to convince himself that this is brave.

He knocks on the hotel door, and is greeted by his mother, her hair caught up in a scarf and her face bare of makeup. Her eyes widen at the sight of him. She’s not used to seeing him two days in a row during the season.

“Can I come in?” he asks, before he lets his fear win. His father’s not here yet, but there’s only a matter of time until he returns. He has twenty minutes to say what needs to be said and be gone, “I need to talk to you.”

“Your father’s out,” she says curiously, standing aside to let him in and shutting the door behind him, “With his friends at the bar. He’ll be bragging about you, you know- August? What’s wrong?”

“Mama,” he says quietly, “I have to tell you something.”

How do you tell your mother, the woman who birthed you and clothed you and wiped away your tears, that she couldn’t protect you from everything? Augustin knows that this will destroy some part of her, but Kent is right at the end of the day. She has to know. She deserves to know. He’s her son.

He says he’ll tell her something, but instead, he tells her everything. Not in so many details, but what he’s done, what he’s said, and worst of all, what was done to him. The humiliation crawls up his skin, slimy and stinging, as he admits things out loud that he’s tried to forget for almost a decade. The more he says, the more he remembers, and the more that spills from his mouth like a flash flood.

He’s a better liar in French, but he’s also better at telling the truth. It feels safer this way, to speak the language of bedtime stories and campfire songs rather than the language of press conferences and phone calls with general managers.

By the end, he’s not crying, and she’s trying her best not to. Her hands flutter over her pink and grey tweed skirt, the one that he got her for Christmas three years ago that Angelique helped him pick out. It’s designer, Dior or Chanel or something. She keeps it wrapped in tissue paper in the box it came in, and only wears it when she sees him.

He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about the skirt so fucking much until her soft hand cups his cheek and forces him to look at her.

“Augustin,” she says, tears glimmering in her eyes, “You have to let me tell your father that this is why you asked to leave Houston.”

“No, Mama-”

“It’s not your fault, August,” she whispers, drawing him in closer. She repeats it over and over as he’s pulled down to nestle his head in her lap. One of her hands comes to run through his hair, while the other lays warm and heavy across his shoulders and back. He still doesn’t cry, though the painful lump in the back of his throat signifies that he might soon.

There’s no age you can grow to become where being in your mother’s arms doesn’t fix something inside of you. Maybe nothing big, maybe not all the way. But for a brief moment, he’s seven, and she’s vanquishing the monsters and nightmares hiding in the shadows of the hall closet.

“I can’t tell Dad,” he says as she strokes his hair, “Mom, you know I can’t tell Dad. He’s already ashamed of me, because of…because I’m never going to marry the girl down the street like he did.”

“Ach, you leave your father to me,” his mother says fiercely, “I’ll tell him what happened in your first year, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t breathe a word of it outside the house. The rest…he will learn with time.”

Augustin’s not sure how true that is. His father is old, and firmly rooted, and he says things like “they can do what they like, but politics don’t belong in hockey.” There’s very little that can be done about that. He burrows his face into his mother’s knee, and lets her comb her fingers through his hair as he counts out two minutes worth of time.

“I have to go, Mama,” he says once those seconds have passed by. He clambers up, and his mother fixes his collar, her fingers glancing over his necklace as she lays the pendant flat against his chest. Her eyebrows raise when his collar shifts to expose a purple splotch on his collarbone.

“As long as you’re happy,” is all she says, though her voice is vaguely disapproving. He chalks that to his apparent whorishness and not the fact that a man left that mark on his skin, “Are you happy, August?”

“I think so.” He kisses her cheeks, “Goodnight. I’ll see you after the playoffs.”

When Kent returns from the bar, cheeks flushed with alcohol and grin lopsided, singing We Are The Champions to himself as he gets ready for bed, Augustin realizes that he doesn’t have to think much more. Maybe he’s not perfectly happy all the time, but more often than not is enough, isn’t it?

They fly back to Vegas the next morning, and he has two missed calls and a missed text when they land. The text is from Jerry: keep me out of your daddy issues.

“Hey,” Kent says, knocking a shoulder into his as they exit the plane. “Wanna come over before conditioning?”

They’ve been spending more time at Kent’s apartment than they have at his, because Kent’s got his little furball to take care of. Augustin nods assent, still staring at his phone screen. His father will be on the road by now on the way back to the Baie. There’s no use in calling him back right this minute.

He’s sprawled across Kent’s couch while Kent’s taking a nap in his room when he finally works up the courage to call his father back. The dial tone rings and rings, and he hopes it goes to voicemail. He hopes that they can just leave it all in a pile on the floor, like laundry to step over instead of sitting down and folding it, until it blends into the furniture as if it had always been there.

His father picks up on the sixth ring, “‘Allo?”

“Dad,” he says cautiously. There’s a bit of a commotion on the other end of the line, and the sound of the television being turned off.

“August,” his father finally says gruffly, “Your…your mother told me about what happened last night. I called Steve, and he said that he thought you had told me years ago.”

That, at least, explains the text message. He waits for his father to continue, but there’s nothing to follow that. They don’t talk often, but he still can’t help but remark on it.

“That’s all you have to say?” He shakes his head. Maybe that’s on him, for getting his hopes a little too high. He tries to make his voice light and courteous, “Okay, fine. Good to hear from you, I’ll see you after playoffs-”

“August, wait,” his father’s voice is pained, “I…I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just tell me. How long have you been lying to me and your mother?”

“I never lied. I did ask for a trade out of Houston. You just never asked why.” He twists a stray thread on the couch’s seam. Kit peers up at him from the floor, her glassy eyes wide and utterly empty. Oh, to live in that kind of blissful ignorance. “I let you believe what you wanted to believe.”

“And what was it that you thought I wanted to believe?”

“I think we both prefer that you believe that I was a spoiled little princess than that I was a coward who couldn’t hit back-”

“That’s not what I believe,” his father says urgently. Augustin feels his tongue shrivel. He has never heard so much emotion in his father’s voice, not even when Grandpere died and he spoke at the funeral. “Augustin, that is not what I believe. Why would you…”

“I was a good son,” Augustin says, his voice rolling from his mouth on a conveyor belt, mechanical and out of his control, “And then when I told you that I was gay, something changed. You stopped-…suddenly, everything I did wasn’t enough. And then this…you told me something once. “You can only get away with it because of how good you are.””

It was when Augustin started lining his eyes with his billet sister’s eyeliner in Rouyn-Noranda. His father took one look at him, shook his head, and told him: “You can only get away with it because of how good you are. Don’t forget that.” He hasn’t forgotten. He will never forget. If he looks back far enough, that was the beginning of the end.

“Shit,” his father sighs, “Shit.”

Augustin listens to the line buzz with silence. Neither of them hangs up, but neither of them can say anything either.

“I just wanted you to have an easier life than me,” his father finally says, his voice dragged down by something heavy, “I didn’t want you to make your life harder than it needed to be.”

Augustin craves control, he likes to be the puppet master. It's always hard to admit when the strings have been cut away from his fingers. “I didn’t make it this way. It just...happened.”

His father's voice is insistent,“Do you still love it, August? Playing?”

Does he still love hockey? Does the earth go around the sun? Does he breathe air, and drink water? There’s nothing, nobody, any place or thing or person who could stop him from loving the feeling of his skates on the ice and his stick in his hands. “Yeah. More than anything.”

“Good.” his father sighs, “You’ve always loved it so much. More than I ever have. I just want to make sure that you still do.”

He’s not going to get an apology or an admission of wrongdoing. He’s already accepted that. “I’ll see you this summer. Does the roof still need to be patched?”

“Yes, it’ll be good to have you home to help. You can invite…your boyfriend, if you like. But only if he helps with the roof.”

Augustin can't help but snort. “Well, he hates golf, so I’m sure that he can be persuaded.”

“Hates golf,” his father mutters incredulously, “And this is the man you want to date?”

“Papa, I also hate golf.”

“Yes, but you’re my son, so that doesn’t matter,” his father grunts, “Hates golf. Those big city types, eh? Troy and Parson both. We’ll show them some real hard work. Call your mother more often, Augustin. She misses you.”

“I will.”

“Good luck with the playoffs.” His father says, and then hangs up. No goodbye. No ‘I love you.’ But it’s something where there used to be nothing. Augustin throws his phone onto the couch and lies limply across the cushions. His father knows now, and the world doesn’t stop spinning.

Kent’s still passed out on the bed wearing only a pair of boxers, but he shifts slightly when Augustin crawls in beside him, rolling onto his side so that Augustin can lay down and let his captain cling to him like a large, blond backpack. Heat radiates through the thin cotton of his T-shirt.

“Who was calling?” Kent asks into the back of his neck, voice still sleepy.

“Shh,” Augustin replies, taking his glasses off and placing them on the nightstand. “Go back to sleep. We have conditioning in an hour and a half.”

“Why, if you insist,” Kent mutters, and his breath evens out almost immediately. Augustin manages to squirm his way to face him without waking him up. Kent’s face is calm and peaceful with sleep, blond hair falling wildly over dark blue pillowcases and tanned, freckled forehead with the barest furrow between his eyebrows. Augustin presses a kiss there, before setting about counting the freckles in twos.

He’s asleep before he gets to thirty-six.

Notes:

augustin came out as gay in chapter two and as a christmas/easter catholic in chapter 19. that's how my priorities work!

alas. sons and their fathers. I've never been a son, but i do have daddy issues! and therefore.

i can't believe there's only two more chapters left to go after this. my my, how time does fly. However, if you like Augustin and all the other bevy of OCs, please subscribe to the series! I have a bunch of things that i want to write about that I think you would all enjoy.

Chapter 20

Summary:

in which there's a first date, a last trade, and a final milestone before the playoffs

So they’re dating now. Boyfriends. Boyfriends? What the fuck does that even mean?

Kent has no idea, and there’s nobody he can ask without getting absolutely thrashed. Swoops would chirp him to death, his sister would make fun of him until the end of time, and his mom would send him a book called something along the lines of The How To Date Guide For Closeted Hockey Players. And don’t even get him started on the blue-eyed Falconer fuckwad that shall not be named, he’s not even going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

He can’t help but wonder, sometimes: would we even be dating under any other circumstances? Or am I just convenient?

He was certainly convenient enough for Augustin to spring on his parents as a sort of fucked-up ‘gotcha’ in the middle of a restaurant, but Kent knows what biting back looks like well enough by now. He bares his teeth into a smile and backs his boyfriend up like a good teammate should, and expects the fallout to blow up in his face afterwards.

Except when it’s his turn to do some biting, Augustin says, “Tell your mom,” and Kent finds that he can’t unhinge his jaw.

His mom is thrilled. She demands that Kent invite Augustin to stay during the summer, and is talking about grandchildren when Kent finally manages to end the conversation so that he can change for their game against Arizona. His face is so red that Scraps chirps him about looking like a boiled crab, and Linsky and Smitty call him Mr. Krabs for the entire warm-up.

So they’re dating. Kent wonders what it entails, and it seems like it doesn’t entail much change. They still live separately, although their respective guest rooms see very little use. Kit is delighted to have Augustin back regularly, to the point where Kent wonders where her true loyalties lie. But that’s all par for the course, and he can’t tell if he’s tricking himself into being on edge, or if there’s anything for them to actually be on edge about.

They’re sitting on Augustin’s couch watching old reruns of MASH, Kent leaned against Augustin’s shoulder with fingers running through his hair, when Augustin says: “Do you want to go on a date?”

It takes him a moment to realize what just happened, since the fingers don’t stop moving and the sensation is lulling him halfway to sleep. Kent blinks blearily at him, “Like…you and me?”

“No, I’m asking for Herlovsen, he just finds you soooooo dreamy but he’s scared that you might want to go steady,” Augustin gives him a stink-eye, and smacks a palm against the side of his head, “Yes, with me, you fucking moron.”

“Hey, fucking forgive me for being confused,” Kent snaps, wriggling out from under his grip, “But it’s not like you know how dates work any more than me.”

“At least I’ve been on one,” Augustin retorts hotly, “More than one! Have you ever been on a date with some that you actually liked, you fucking dweeb? Fucking forget it, I’m not taking you out anymore. We’ll just sit on this couch and rot.”

Kent stews mulishly for a minute before curiosity gets the best of him, “...where were you going to take me?”

“Axe-throwing,” Augustin says, and Kent can’t tell if he’s serious or not. Augustin doesn’t let on, just tugs Kent in for a slow, easy kiss that makes his bones collapse and sink against his body. He never used to be this sappy and disgusting. It’s downright fucking embarrassing, and yet he would let Augustin do a thousand embarrassing things to him.

Is this what dating is? Letting someone change you? Kent famously doesn’t like change.

When Augustin asks again, they’re getting ready to leave for an away game in Vancouver. “Do you want to go on a date? With me.”

Kent squints up at him, stopping mid-motion, “Like, right now?”

“Why did you stop?” Augustin asks, his annoyance essentially neutered by the fact that his voice is more of a panting, whiny breath.

“Because you just asked me a question and I need my mouth to answer?” Kent can’t help but smile innocently up at him when Augustin tugs at his hair, “So do you want me to answer or do you want me to-”

“Keep going, putain de crisse d’esti a merde!”

It’s only when they’ve both buttoned, zipped, and driven out of the parking lot of Kent’s apartment complex in Augustin’s stupid white sedan that Kent answers: “Sure. Let’s go on a date.”

He thinks that once they land, they’ll keep their suits on and go to one of the fancy seafood restaurants overlooking the mountains and water that Kent always likes to visit when he plays here. They’ll look like they’re stopping in after a long flight, just two teammates whose ankles knock together under the table.

Augustin’s idea of a date is the woods.

It’s not so much that Kent dislikes the woods as he does feel that humanity has progressed past its need to be in the woods. Augustin tells him to change once they get to the hotel, and when Kent comes out in his typical flannel and jeans combo, Augustin just laughs and throws a blue fleece sweater at him. That’s about when Kent realizes, “Aw, fuck, we’re going to be outside, aren’t we?”

It’s cloudy, but not raining, and everything is tinged curiously blue as they get into the black rental car and Augustin drives them north, over a bridge and apparently into the middle of fucking nowhere as the mountains yawn over their heads. Kent’s used to massive cities of glass and steel, or flashy lights in the desert. No in-between. Part of him thinks they’re going to practice axe-throwing with him as the target as they drive into a small, gravelly parking lot.

“Why are we here?” He asks as he shuts the door. The air smells green, and the trees are taller than most things he’s ever seen. “Like, not for nothing, but when you said ‘date,’ I imagined, like…dinner?”

“It’s eleven in the morning,” Augustin says. He seems much more at peace here than he does in the cities. Maybe it’s a rural thing, to long for the trees or whatever. He slings a small backpack filled with God-knows-what onto his back and says, “Come on.”

Kent’s not sure why they’re here until they get onto a thin trail of beaten dirt, and Augustin takes his hand. Their fingers interlace firmly. The trail is empty, the air is damp and cold, and the farther they go, Kent starts to see the charm of it. Most of the charm is in Augustin’s peaceful smile and the lack of bugs.

“I like being outside,” Augustin says as they go, like the absence of car sounds and desert dust is pulling his voice from him to fill in the gaps, “I miss forests. Baie-Comeau, we produce pulp and paper products, so we have a lot of forest. That’s, uh... probably what I would be doing if I wasn’t here.”

“I don’t think you would,” Kent says, partly distracted by a gnarly-looking yellow slug oozing over a wet leaf, and partly because the warmth of Augustin’s palm against his own in broad daylight is driving him a little insane, “I think you would have gone to school.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I’d have ended up back home anyway. What would you have done?”

“I don’t know,” Kent says honestly. There was never anything else, never even a chance of it. The last time he wanted to be anything other than an NHL hockey player was when he was seven, and he wanted to be a doctor. “I never really thought about it before.”

Augustin makes a considering face. They walk for about an hour, maybe a little less, and only two or three people are walking on the winding trail past them who cause them to drop their hands. Kent’s beginning to understand why they’re here, now. It feels normal. They could be anybody, any couple in their mid-twenties taking a morning stroll.

The last time that he felt this way about someone, all they did together was hole up in hotel bedrooms, drink too much, and end up on the ice early in the mornings chasing each other around like little kids. Kent realizes he would suffer a thousand bug bites for an hour of peaceful, unafraid existence like this.

“I think you’re a genius,” he tells Augustin, breaking the comfortable silence.

“Uh, okay.” Augustin replies, a bemused look on his face, “Thanks. You hungry?”

The backpack, it turns out, has food in it: a massive chicken sandwich that Augustin throws at his head, a few protein bars, and a large water bottle.

“You came prepared,” Kent chirps, “I didn’t know you were a Boy Scout.”

“I could let you starve,” Augustin says, handing him one of the chocolate protein bars he usually keeps stocked in the pantry. They sit on a set of grey rocks off to the side of the trail, and Kent doesn’t care that his jogging pants are getting damp from the patches of moss.

“So, what else do people do on dates, since you’re so wise and experienced in the realm of gay relationships-”

“Okay, enough of that,” Augustin retorts, “You’re worse than my fucking sister.”

Kent takes a bite of his protein bar. His tone was joking, sure, but he’s not actually sure what to do next. Every date he’s ever been on has been at a fancy, dark restaurant, with a nice girl that he’s not particularly interested in in any romantic capacity. He usually just asks a lot of questions and lets her talk. And he pays. “Is it question time, then?”

“Sure.” Augustin says, shrugging, “Let’s talk. Get to know each other.”

“We already know each other.”

Augustin gives him the dirtiest look he’s ever seen in his life, even worse than the time that Kent stole his Habs t-shirt, and he relents, “Fine. What’s the biggest animal you think you could take in a fight?”

If Augustin thinks the question is weird, he doesn’t show it, “What are the parameters? Do I get a weapon, or is it, like, hand-to-hand combat?”

“Like right now, right here, there’s an animal and it wants to kill you and it won’t stop until it’s dead or you incapacitate it.”

Augustin thinks for a moment, “An ostrich.”

Kent snorts as he balls up his sandwich wrapper, “You’re out of your fucking mind. An ostrich would run you over like a fucking pickup truck.”

Augustin points at a large branch sitting in the undergrowth, “I would hit it in the neck.”

“You are absurd,” Kent tells him, because he is. The most serious, unsmiling, focused player he knows, earnestly telling him that he would hit an ostrich on the neck to subdue it in hand-to-hand combat. “I think I could do a shark.”

“Oh, so I’m crazy for saying ostrich, but shark is fair play?” Augustin jabs a finger at his nose, “Date’s over, finish your sandwich, we’re going back to the hotel to watch Jaws. A fucking shark. You’re fucking ridiculous.”

They end up making out against a tree like teenagers instead, for so long that they have to run the rest of the trail, and break several traffic laws on the way back to their hotel.

“Nice of you to finally show up!” Scraps chirps as they scramble onto the bus in their game suits, and Kent flips him off as he slides into the seat next to Augustin. Augustin’s lucky tie, dusky green silk patterned with trees, is crooked, and he reaches out to straighten it.

A hazy memory hits him sharp and fast, of watching his mother fix his father’s tie every time before he met a new client. His palm flattens over the tie like hers used to do, making sure there are no creases. A lot of his mannerisms resemble hers, but he never imagined that this one would ever crop up. He looks up to see Augustin’s vaguely concerned face, and gives the tie one last pat before his hand retreats.

“Hey,” Augustin says as the bus lurches into motion, “Did you know that Parson thinks he could take a shark in a fight?”

He thinks he’s going to get chirped to hell and back until Swoops asks, “The team or the fish?” and Flicker bemusedly chimes in with, “Sharks aren’t fish.”

Suffice to say, Kent gets off scott free on that one.

---

The night before the trade deadline, Augustin doesn’t typically sleep.

Kent wanders out of the bedroom at two in the morning, rubbing his eyes and yawning, “Why are you awake?”

“Trade deadline,” Augustin mutters, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He knows that he’s not going to be traded, because he’s pretty sure they’re making a push for the playoffs now that they’re seventh in the league and poised to be sixth. Kent yawns again, walking around the couch instead of leaping over it, and shuts Augustin’s laptop.

“Lie down,” he says, and then basically falls on top of Augustin. That’s how they fall asleep: Augustin crushed under a hundred and sixty-five pounds of the best player in the NHL on his apartment’s couch.

He wakes up to find Kent making coffee in his kitchen, and a new trade update on his phone.

@nhl: Las Vegas Aces trade D Holden Boyce (Reno Gunslingers), second-round pick (2018, from Florida) to the Houston Aeros for F Kevin Mitsuya.

@lvaces: Aces acquire F Kevin Mitsuya from the Houston Aeros. Welcome to Sin City.

“In thirty minutes or so,” Kent says, probably having heard Augustin pick up his phone from the coffee table, “Jason Kirby is going to call you about Mitsuya.”

“Why me?” Augustin asks dizzily. He can’t really wrap his head around the trade. Logically, it makes sense: they need another depth winger, and the Aeros need defensive prospects desperately, but Mitsuya’s departure is going to devastate the Aeros’ morale. They love the kid. Their playing style is going to sink rapidly, and they’re barely clinging to a wild card spot.

He supposes that if a team’s admiration isn’t enough to save someone from the trade block, nothing is.

“Dunno,” Kent says with false levity, “Probably your charming personality and constant optimism.”

“Har-har,” his legs ache from yesterday’s game as he stands, and there’s a sore spot on his shoulder where Kent’s bowling ball head was perched last night. “Did he call you first?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, sliding a mug of coffee onto the wooden dining table. He’s managed to do in three days what Augustin couldn’t figure out in three weeks: how to work his new coffee machine, with its thousand flashing buttons and curious lack of a coffee pot. “He’s torn up about it, but he’s trying not to show it. They love the kid down there.”

“I know.”

Kent is giving him a weird look that he ignores as he pours maple syrup into his coffee to sweeten it. Whatever he’s thinking, it must be serious, because Kent has made fun of Augustin’s obscenely Canadian choice of sweeteners every day since he found out how Augustin actually likes his coffee. It’s not his fault that refined sugars aren’t on his diet plan, honey tastes like wax, and artificial sweeteners freak him out.

“What?” He asks, skirting the table and hunting around his cupboards for his pan. All his cooking appliances are the only things that he bought himself, because he knows what he likes. He’s busily whisking eggs and spinach together as turkey bacon sizzles on the stove when Kent finally speaks.

“He’s not going to…”

“What?” Augustin says uncharitably, “Be like me? Fucked up?”

Kent’s lips purse angrily, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. Maybe they’ve both changed more than either of them want to admit—a month ago, Augustin wouldn’t have stopped at that, and Kent wouldn’t have stayed silent. They both would have yelled awful, bitter things at each other and stormed off to separate ends of the city.

He still has his spreadsheet, but only for its mathematical usefulness. His head’s still not screwed on straight, but he’s still seeing Dr. Tidey even though he fulfilled the terms of his suspension two sessions ago. God bless the Aces commitment to mental health insurance.

He finishes cooking breakfast as Kent glares mutinously at him, and leans his hip against the counter as he waits for his phone to ring. He has a stomach of iron, but every sip of coffee corrodes his stomach.

“Is it good?” He asks as Kent devours his eggs.

“Yeah,” Kent retorts like he’s personally insulted by the fact that he likes Augustin’s cooking.

His phone rings, but it isn’t a number with a familiar Houston area code. Kent stops eating as he picks up. “Good morning, Mr. St. Martin.”

“Augustin, it’s past noon,” Hollis says, and doesn’t stop to breathe before pushing onwards. Augustin checks his watch, and sucks at his teeth while Hollis barrels on, “Are you available this afternoon?”

“Uh, yes?”

“Good. Would you mind if Kevin Mitsuya stayed with you until the season is over? He’ll be replacing Omdahl on our main roster, and since you’ve both played for the Aeros, we figured the transition would be easier. You have a guest room, right?”

Augustin looks at the guest room that he does technically have, and begrudgingly says, “Yes.”

“Good. His plane lands in about an hour,” Hollis says, “If you can’t pick him up, we can send Jerome.”

Augustin can think of only one thing less hospitable to be met at the airport with than Jerome and it’s a bear high on cocaine. “Nah, I can…I can get the kid.”

Hollis brusquely gives him the flight information. He hangs up and looks helplessly at Kent, who’s toying with the last vestiges of his meal. “I have to go to the airport in an hour.”

“He’s staying with you?” Kent asks, eyes wide, “I told them that Beth was here, but I thought Swoops or Cross-”

“Neither of them played for the Aeros,” Augustin reasons. He waits for Kent to say something about how Kevin hasn’t done anything to him, and how every kid deserves a chance, and yada yada sanctimonious stuff that Augustin already knows. He braces himself for the fight.

Kent doesn’t do any of that. All he does is smile and say, “Huh.”

“What does that mean, huh?”

“Nothing,” Kent replies, standing and taking his dishes to the sink. He says evasively, “I was just thinking about our first airport experience. You were a dick, by the way.”

“That was like a thousand years ago.” It was six months ago, but who’s counting? “Get over it.”

Kent’s still got that weird all-knowing smile on his face as Augustin bustles around getting his apartment suitable for human arrivals: scooping up discarded clothes, making sure the plumbing in the guest bathroom works, and wondering why the fuck he only owns two towels.

“That’s my towel,” Kent says sadly as Augustin pulls it out of the washing machine and throws it in the dryer.

“Not anymore. Live at your own place, buy your own towel. Does your sister even know that you’re here? What if she thinks you were murdered?”

Kent’s nose wrinkles, “She’d probably say, “oh, lucky me, I have the apartment all to myself forever.””

Beth Parson arrived two days ago for her school’s Reading Break, and they’ve made a sport of double-teaming Kent every time Augustin goes over to his apartment. It feels strange to show any form of affection in front of someone else, but Beth has already loudly declared her approval of Augustin by making numerous, very gratifying jokes about how Kent is punching above his weight in the looks department. Augustin supposes being related to Kent distorts any image she might have of how he actually looks, but he appreciates the compliments nonetheless.

“Besides,” Kent says, “Where else would I be?”

“With any of your other friends,” Augustin presses a finger to his chin, “Oh, wait-”

“Somebody’s projecting,” Kent leans over the back of the couch, “Hey, come here.”

“Why? Did you spill coffee on my fucking couch-”

Kent tugs him down by the collar of his hoodie, kissing him so soundly that Augustin has to brace his hands on the back of the couch. He pulls back slightly and Kent follows, kneeling on the couch cushions as Augustin cups a hand around the nape of his neck. How is it that it’s become this easy, this natural?

His phone buzzes on the table, and Kent breaks away with an aborted groan when Augustin turns to check it, “Ignore it, we have ten minutes.”

“I can’t,” Augustin says, because Kirbs hasn’t changed his number since they met. Kent goes quiet, and releases his hold on Augustin’s hoodie. There’s a pit in his gut as he walks over to the phone, fingers twitching towards the receive button. He swallows his bile and presses his phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

The line is quiet for a second before Kirby warily says, “Berenger. It’s Jason Kirby.”

They used to be friends, back when Augustin had those. Kirby was bigger and older, but he was never angry or jealous that Augustin was better than him, or got more than him. If anything, he was only ever jealous that the Aeros liked him better. But they had been friends. Augustin was there when he met his now-wife, and thought at the time that he might get a chance to tell the story of how they met at Kirby’s wedding. It’s a good story.

But life doesn’t always go that way, and he can’t say “I miss you” to someone who had a part in destroying him. He doubts Kirby would want to hear it, either.

“Hey, Kirby,” he says neutrally, fingers tapping the wooden dining table, “Sorry to hear about Mitsuya-”

“Mitty’s a good kid,” Kirby says bluntly, “He’s like, a goddamn saint, actually. I mean, we know a lot of Canadians, but he’s like…just nice.”

“I’m Canadian,” Augustin says. Kent gives him a weird look from the couch.

“Yeah, but you’re, like, French Canadian,” Kirby grunts, “Anyways, I just wanted to say that he’s a really good kid, just full of heart and grit, and you’re lucky to have him. Is he staying with Parson or Troy? I forgot to ask.”

“He’s staying with me.”

The line is silent for a few moments, before Kirby quietly says, “Oh.”

He’s worried, Augustin can tell that by his voice. So desperate for Augustin to know that Kevin is a good kid, because he thinks Augustin is going to do what was done to him: take something out on a kid which isn’t his fault. His gut curdles with anger, and he has to flatten his palm on the surface of the dining table to keep from smacking his fist against something.

“I got him,” he tells Kirby. It’s far outside them now. They will never be friends again, never trust each other again, but as long as they both know that nobody else exists within their fucked up old world, maybe it’ll all be okay. “We’ve got him, we’ll take care of him. He’s not gonna be like us.”

Kirby blows out a long breath that rustles through the line. He doesn’t apologize, and Augustin doesn’t ask for one. “Right. Well, I’ll send his stuff over when I can. What’s your address?”

Augustin tells him, and then they bid each other a stiff goodbye. He hangs up first. Kent watches him as he gathers his keys and wallet, doing one last sweep of the place before he leaves. He doesn’t ask anything, and Augustin doesn’t offer it. There’s not much to say.

“You should go back to your place and make sure Beth isn’t asleep or on shrooms again,” he says as he puts his jacket on. Kent clambers off the couch and grabs his coat off of the chair. They kiss by the door, like his mother used to do with his father in the mornings, and walk out together, Kent’s hand staying on the small of his back until they reach their cars. There’s a lingering patch of warmth as Augustin peels out of his apartment’s parking lot.

Approximately twenty minutes later, he’s in the Arrivals terminal of McCarran. Kevin Mitsuya comes out of the same door, doing the same dejected walk of shame that Augustin did at the start of the season. He’s six-foot-three and has a shaggy dark rocker-mullet type thing going on, so he sticks out like a sore thumb in the crowd. When he spots Augustin, he can only manage a weak smile. Augustin tries to look welcoming, but he can feel his face doing something that must look alarming, so he stops.

“Hi,” Mitsuya says as he draws closer, dragging his carry-on behind him. Its zipper looks as if it's about to burst. He sticks out a hand, “I’m Kevin. Mitsuya. But you already…know that.”

“Augustin,” he shakes it, “You can call me Gus.”

“Oh,” Mitsuya blinks at him, as if confused why Augustin hasn’t immediately spit in his face, “You can call me Mitty, then. Or Kev. Either works. I just need, uh…to grab my bag.”

He’s wearing a nondescript black hoodie, but he’s still got a navy blue Aeros cap on his head as he gathers his gear bag and slings it over his shoulder. Their walk to the parking lot is tense and awkward: Augustin’s not a natural conversationalist, and Mitsuya is clearly suffering from the brutal hangover of his first trade along with the apprehension of a teammate he thinks hates him.

“So,” Augustin says as they get into the car, taking his spare key out of his pocket and handing it to Mitsuya. He’s never been the one housing a rookie before, and he’s not sure how close to parenting it’s supposed to be. He feels like an overgrown camp counsellor, “Like, I guess…house rules? You can come and go whenever you want, just make sure the lights are off when you leave. I don’t drink, but you can have alcohol in the apartment, I don’t care, and, uh…just give me a heads up when there’s someone coming over. And let me know if you get a car. Until then, you can borrow this one.”

“Cool,” Mitsuya says, so upbeat that even Augustin can tell that it’s fake. He looks around the interior of Augustin’s sedan and a little bit of his wide smile becomes real, “You and my mom have the same car.”

“God forbid me and your mom care about the environment,” Augustin says as he steers out of the parking lot, “If you want a gas-guzzling monstrosity, talk to Cross about his midlife-crisis pickup truck.”

Mitsuya picks nervously at the seam of his pants, “So…I heard there’s not a practice until tomorrow morning.”

“No, but Troy’s having a barbeque at his place tonight,” Augustin says. He wasn’t planning on going, but he hedges, “Would you…want to go? You don’t have to, if you’re tired and shit.”

“I guess I should meet the team before we play tomorrow, right?” Mitsuya laughs weakly. “Potential lineys and stuff.”

“You’re a right winger, usually,” Augustin muses, more to himself than anything else, “They’ll probably put you with Kosmatka and Buckley on the fourth. But yeah, we can go. Parson and Cross will be there too, so-”

Mitsuya pales at the mention of Kent’s name, and Augustin squints at him, “What?”

“It’s just…” Mitsuya waves his hands emphatically, “You get drafted and stuff, and you get to play against all these great players, but I never imagined, you know…I mean, it’s Kent fucking Parson. I’m about to play hockey with Kent Parson.”

Augustin forgets, sometimes, that Kent is a household name in every sense. “Yeah, I guess. It would kinda be like playing for the Pens, eh? My palms get fucking sweaty at the thought of it.”

“Yeah,” Mitsuya laughs, “That’s exactly it. I wouldn’t think you’d ever feel that way, though.”

“Why?”

“Because you went first overall in your draft and I was a hundred and thirty-sixth,” Mitsuya says dryly. Augustin can’t help but smile.

“Playing with Parse is terrifying whether or not you go first or four-hundredth. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Neither will you.” They’re coming up to the fork in the road, and he asks, “Do you wanna drive down the Strip? I hear some people get a kick out of it.”

“Nah,” Mitsuya replies with apparent honesty, “Not really my thing.”

The kid relaxes slightly once he gets to the apartment, and Augustin’s just glad that his place doesn’t inspire abject disgust or disappointment. “This is it. Sorry if it’s, like… messy.”

“Nah, it’s sick,” Mitsuya says as he follows Augustin to the guest bedroom, “Is this an old factory or something? That’s cool as hell.” He politely leaves his suitcase in the corner of the guest bedroom and flings himself onto the bed with a sigh, “Holy fuck, where is this mattress from? I could fall asleep for fucking ever.”

Augustin snorts and checks his watch, “Sorry, kid, no time to nap. We gotta get going soon. If you wanna grab a shower, there’s a towel in the bathroom.”

“Thanks,” Mitsuya grins, his smile so endearing that Augustin can’t help the one he gives in return.

The second the shower starts running, he calls Angelique. He’s not above this sort of thing. She deals with kids on a daily basis, and Augustin can’t remember much about being twenty-one anymore.

“I have the kid,” he says without preamble, “Now what do I do?”

“You have Mitsuya?” Angelique asks over the sound of a pen scratching across paper, “Like, living with you? Huh. Well, I mean, generally with kids, you feed them, make sure they don’t smell bad or hurt themselves, put them in therapy-”

There’s a distinct snickering noise on the other end of the line, and Augustin scowls, “Are you in a meeting right now?”

“Hey, you’re the one who called in the middle of my workday. I’m in with one of our freshmen, but he’s cool. Are you cool, Jansing?”

“I’m cool, Coach,” a faint, excited Southern drawl says on the other end of the line. “I’ll be quiet.”

“Hey, by the way, if the Aces are looking to draft a developed left-handed forward, this is your guy. Tell Kent, so he can pass it on. I already have Jeff-”

“Stop selling me children,” he hisses, “It’s weird, and I already have one. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Stop phrasing it like that, and I don’t actually know why you’re calling me,” Angelique retorts, “You know what this means, August? It means that you’re not a perpetual fucking newcomer anymore. It means that you’re one of them. You’re an Ace.”

“I’ve been an Ace for six months.”

“Fucking Christ, I swear sometimes you’re perpetually dense on purpose so that I can use you as an example of why hockey players should stay in school. Do you hear me, Jansing? Stay in school!”

“Hey!” Augustin snaps, “What the actual fuck are you talking about?”

“You’re one of them now,” Angelique says exasperatedly, “They trust you. You’re one of the core, you fucking moron.”

For his entire career, he has existed on the periphery. Sometimes it’s self-imposed, sometimes it is imposed onto him, but he’s always the one who stays with someone else. He lives in basement suites and guest rooms, perpetually nomadic, like one of those fucking twirling seed pods that spirals down from the trees, or the little cartoon rats with the red-and-white bundle on the end of a stick over their shoulders.

Things don’t typically grow in the desert, but somehow, he grew roots when he wasn’t looking.

“August?”

The shower shuts off with a creak, and Augustin clears his throat. “Jansing, can you hear me?”

“Uh, yeah- yes, sir,” the young voice says nervously, “Hi, Mr. Berenger.”

“Pay attention to what she tells you, alright? She’s the best there is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“August,” Angelique says again, and her voice is slightly choked.

“Angie, don’t be a little bitch baby,” he tells her, and then hangs up before she can get sentimental in her old age.

Mitsuya comes out with his hair damp and gelled back, wearing a leather jacket. Augustin doesn’t remember looking that cool at twenty-one, which feels unfair, but he’s not about to do anything about it other than snort and say, “There’s not going to be any girls there.”

“Hey, I do this for me,” Mitsuya retorts with a wide smile, “Self-love and shit.”

So Augustin wears his leather jacket too, because he can’t let the new kid look better than him. They stop by a small plaza with a grocery store, and he lets Mitsuya pick their contribution to the barbecue. He expects the kid to hit the liquor aisle, but instead, Mitsuya beelines to the bakery section and grabs enough cookies to bury their nutritionist alive.

“Oh my God,” the cashier checking them out says, and there’s really no way of knowing whether he’s saying it about the two professional hockey players or the sheer quantity of baked goods.

Mitsuya gapes at the Christmas light hedge when they walk up to Swoops’ McMansion, and turns to Augustin like is this for real? Augustin just nods gravely around the stack of cookie boxes. Part of him wonders when this change occurred, how he became the one that accepted the appearance of black hedges glimmering with a supernova of festivity as normal.

The Aces are all gathered in Troy’s house, blissfully calm compared to the New Year’s Eve Party—which isn’t actually that calm—but they welcome Mitsuya like he’s always been there. Augustin finds himself lurking warily in the background like a bodyguard as they make their way through the house. Kent’s nowhere to be found, but Scraps mentions that he’s in the back with Troy and Cross when he comes out to welcome Mitsuya and hand him a beer.

“Augustin!” a familiar voice says from behind them as Scraps wanders away to supply others with liquor like an irresponsible Santa Claus. Every voice in here is familiar, but this one is different from the others. He and Mitsuya turn around and Mitsuya’s jaw drops with an audible sound.

Augustin’s not about to tell a girl what she can and can’t wear, because he’s a decent man and also his sister would chop off his head, but he does understand why Kent was sending him so many unintelligible, vaguely annoyed text messages earlier. Beth’s decked out in an elegant silk slip dress that’s classy but leaves little to the imagination, with her hair in a high, curled ponytail and her mouth curved in a mischievous, red smile.

Mitsuya looks utterly starstruck by her. He’s probably stoked that he’s wearing the leather jacket now, “Uh, hi. You, uh…hey. Are you, um…here with anyone?”

“Hi,” Beth says to him with a sunny smile, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear, “Gus, do you care to make introductions, or are you just going to stand there like a dick?”

“Beth, this is Kevin Mitsuya, he just got traded here from the Aeros,” Augustin’s never had elder-sibling privilege before; his protectiveness over Angelique has always been relatively toothless, like a declawed cat. But this, on the other hand, is finally his chance to have the fun, “Kevin, this is Beth Parson, Kent’s little sister.”

Mitsuya goes pale as a sheet at the mention of Beth’s last name, “Oh, uh, hey. Really nice to meet you, seriously. I, uh…need another drink. A soda! Not alcohol. Can I get you…” he shakes his head, “Be right back!”

Beth glares at Augustin as Mitsuya beats a hasty retreat into the kitchen, beer still in hand, “My brother is such a bad fucking influence on you.”

“Aren’t you dating someone?” Augustin replies, raising an eyebrow. This older-sibling thing is kind of fun, “What’s his face? Roman?”

“We didn’t work out, but we’re still friends, and now he’s dating this guy-” Beth says, and then her mouth prunes in a remarkably Kent-like fashion, “Why the fuck am I telling you this?”

“I’m trustworthy like that,” he’s struggling not to laugh, and the struggle is winning, “Don’t date a hockey player, I literally beg you.”

“Pot, kettle,” she says, but she’s grinning now too. Augustin feels his face flush, and she puts on a knowing smile, “He’s out back making sure Jeff doesn’t burn anything.”

“Do not kill Mitsuya,” Augustin tells her as he leaves, “I’m serious, he’s a depth forward and we need him!”

“No promises!”

Only Jeff would have a barbecue in early March, but they have reason to celebrate: two months of guaranteed job security, and the impending playoffs season is starting to hum under all of their skins. Jeff and Cross are arguing over the barbecue itself, each one holding a pair of tongs like they’re about to go fencing with dollar-store cooking utensils. Kent has his phone out recording.

“Blood sport?” Augustin asks. Kent turns to grin at him.

“Blood sport.”

“This is everything wrong with your country today,” he replies as Cross starts hitting Jeff on the head with his tongs. Kent snorts, ending the video and pocketing his phone. He leans against Augustin, their bare forearms brushing, all they can really have in front of everyone else.

“So, how’s the kid?” he asks, and Augustin can tell from his smile that they’re both thinking about the exact same thing, or rather, the exact same day. This one went far better, all things considered.

“Fucking nice,” Augustin takes a sip of the water he picked up from the kitchen as the bickering peters out and Cross wanders back inside so his wife can comfort him. “I saw your sister, by the way.”

Kent frowns, “You didn’t get my texts?”

“I skimmed them,” he admits, “You text like you’re four years old and illiterate. Anyways, the kid’s…good. Nice. He’s also in love with her.”

“With who?”

Augustin grins, “Beth.”

Kent groans loudly, head tipping back as he rolls his eyes, “I fucking knew this was going to happen. It’s the Parson animal magnetism, it’s a fucking curse, I swear.

“I told her not to date a hockey player.”

“Yeah? How’d she take it?”

“She called me a hypocrite,” Augustin nudges him with an elbow. “For what it’s worth, if my sister was going to date anyone on the team-”

“-which she is, oh God, this can’t keep happening-”

“-there are a lot worse options than Mitsuya.”

Kent regards him with the same unreadable look as this morning, but before he can say anything else, Jeff is shoving a platter of only mostly charred burgers and chicken into each of their hands and demanding that they take them inside. The Aces fall onto the food like wolves on a carcass, but they all eat standing up by the open patio door, holding cheap paper plates with drinks resting on various precarious surfaces as they pack into the kitchen.

Augustin’s separated from Kent, but slowly finds that it doesn’t make much of a difference. If not Kent, Smitty is there, and if not Smitty, then Scraps, and if not Scraps, then Makela, and on and on until Augustin realizes that he actually knows everybody here, and that everybody knows him in turn.

Angelique’s words echo in his head: You’re one of them now.

Eventually, the sheer noise overwhelms him, and he goes off in search of comfortable silence and solitude. He ends up back in Troy’s guest suite, and laughs to himself as he sits on the bed. He’s never really taken the chance to look around and truly absorb how ugly this room and the rest of Troy’s design sensibilities are. Any rookie who has to sleep in here should be financially compensated. If he ever moves in with Angelique, hopefully she'll handle the interior design.

The sound of soft, familiar footsteps interrupts his thoughts.

“Hey,” Kent says, lingering in the doorway, “Are you sleepy, grandpa?”

“I’m fourteen months older than you,” Augustin replies. Kent grins and closes the door behind him, leaving only a small crack of light leaking in, and pads over. Beth obviously helped him dress, because he’s not wearing anything horrendous today: just a white linen short-sleeve and grey pants, an outfit disrupted by the palm-tree patterned snapback containing his cowlicks. Somehow, it works. It wouldn’t be Kent otherwise.

“Getting deja vu?” he asks as Kent looks around. Kent makes a face.

“I’m just glad I never had to live here. Shetty’s basement was way nicer. I think, uh…Flicker had to live here a couple years ago, he left that chip on the wall.”

Augustin hums, “Not what I meant, but sure. I'm itching to talk about Daniel.”

“No, I know what you meant,” Kent grins, teeth flashing in the orange light. The memories settle over them like ghosts, and Augustin wants to put them to rest. He wants a redo.

“This ugly bedspread,” he murmurs, drawing Kent in between his legs by his belt loops, “This heinous lamp, do you remember? When you crawled off my lap and ran away?”

“Are you saying I owe you?” Kent asks lowly, hands braced on Augustin’s shoulders, one running slowly up his neck. Augustin makes a considering face just before Kent leans down to press their mouths together. It starts off slow, but somewhere along the line, one of them goes a little too hard, a little too fast, just like they always do. Suddenly, Augustin’s shirt is half-off, rucked up to his chest, and he’s biting a mark into Kent’s collarbone, tugging the white button-down out of slate-grey pants.

“Oh, shit.”

It feels as though he’s been shoved into a snowbank. He rips his mouth away from Kent’s skin and sees that Mitsuya is standing in the doorway, his hand braced against the doorframe and face pale as a sheet. Augustin’s heart sinks. He and Kent are both frozen in place, horror-struck, and he can’t help but wish that he was just a little bit nicer to the kid when he had the chance.

“Uh,” Mitsuya says, his tanned face sallow and eyes wide, “Sorry, Swoops- Troy was looking for Parson, and I, uh- shit, I’m sorry, I should go-”

He turns and makes a run for it before either of them can stop him.

“Shit,” Kent breathes, combing his fingers through his obscene blond hair, pupils the size of pinpricks in pools of grey-green as he scoops up his hat. Augustin straightens his shirt, fingers fumbling as he swallows down the welling panic in his chest. “Shit.”

“Well,” Augustin says, because if he doesn’t try to be normal, he’ll start hyperventilating, “At least the team already knows about you. Buckley’s gonna have a fucking field day if he ever finds out about this.”

“We can never make out in here ever again,” Kent hisses as they leave, “It’s bad luck.”

“Somehow, I think Jeff won’t mind that.”

Mitsuya’s nowhere to be found, and Augustin’s stomach turns over when he can’t find the leather jacket and tall head of hair in the crowd. He spots Cross hiding with the other veterans in the living room, in what the younger Aces have affectionately dubbed the “old man corner.”

“Hey, have any of you seen Mitsuya?”

“Lost your rookie already?” Keever, the second-line center, asks with a gap-toothed grin. Scraps is just laughing at him.

“Hey, at least my back still works, McKeever,” Augustin retorts. The veterans all regard him with similar grins.

“You’ll be one of us soon enough,” Normie, one of the d-men, says ominously, and they all laugh as he walks away.

He ends up finding Mitsuya in the kitchen talking to Beth, but stops before he can confront the kid. Beth is laughing as he sheepishly offers her a cookie, and Augustin feels a little too old and proud all of a sudden.

“You think he’s a good guy?” Kent says from his elbow, reappearing through the other end of the kitchen. His voice is still trembling slightly.

“Yeah,” Augustin says, against all odds. “I think so.”

“Found him!”

Jeff storms into the kitchen, bringing half the Aces in with him, chanting, “Speech, speech, speech!”

“Oh God,” Kent says even though he’s grinning as they sweep him out into the dining room. He stands up on the dining table, using the top of Allie’s head to balance himself, and the Aces congregate and cheer as he holds up his beer.

“I’m not going to lie,” he says, and the room goes quiet, “We started this season with the shittiest losing streak ever. But from where we are now, we can’t even see that shit in the rearview mirror!”

The Aces cheer, slamming their fists on wood and stone. Kent shouts over them, “Listen! Listen. We started this season as a completely different team, and I know that we all miss our old teammates a hell of a lot. I wish they could be here, too.” A solemnity falls over the room, especially in the old man corner, but Kent inhales deeply and smiles, “But I think we have one of the best, most promising fucking teams in the goddamn show. So, to all our new teammates this year: Smitty, Petal, Gus, Linsky, Ruben, Allie, Frisk, and now Mitty, this is to you.”

“And to the fucking Stanley Cup!” Smitty shouts.

Kent raises his bottle and grins wildly, teeth bared and on full display, “And to the fucking Stanley Cup!”

“Very nice,” Augustin says as Kent hops down from the table with only a little bit of a wobble, when really, he’s breathless. Kent’s larger than life on a good day, but just then? He’s surprised that there was no halo of gold or something similar to mark just how incredible he is.

“I try,” Kent replies, mortal once more, “Your rookie looks like he’s about to pass out.”

Mitsuya’s swaying on his feet, yawning and rubbing his eyes every few minutes. Augustin’s just glad he has an excuse to bow out before midnight. “Think we might head out, I guess.”

“Yeah, like you’re disappointed about that.” Kent retorts, “Old man.”

“I’m still twenty-five.”

“Oh, sorry, right. Middle-aged man.”

“Ha.” Augustin deadpans, and knocks Kent’s cap off before going to collect Mitsuya before he passes out. The kid protests, but not hard enough to stop Augustin from bundling him out the door.

“But I didn’t say thanks to Swoops-”

“He’ll live. Get in the car before you fall asleep on the lawn and Jeff's neighbour ritualistically sacrifices you.”

The car is recycling the thick awkwardness through the ventilations system. They’re on the road for a couple of minutes before Augustin manages to find his ability to speak. Mitsuya’s head is leaning against the glass window, watching the cookie-cutter houses pass by when he finally clears his throat and says, “Listen, about what you saw-”

“I didn’t see anything,” Mitsuya says frantically, “I swear!”

He can’t help it. It’s not funny, but he snorts, “Mitty, you saw me making out with Kent Parson.”

“Yeah,” Mitsuya says nervously, “Yeah, uh…look, I didn’t know that you two were…uh...”

“Gay?” Augustin looks over at him, “Dating? Kent’s out to the team, but I, uh…I’m not. Not yet, anyway. So, like…I’d appreciate it, or, well, we’d appreciate it if you-”

“Didn’t say anything?” Mitsuya asks. Augustin nods as they come to a stop at a red light, and Mitsuya echoes the motion slowly “Yeah, for sure, man. I, uh…I got you.”

His fingers white-knuckle the steering wheel. Six months ago, he would have been curled up in a hole in the ground if anyone ever knew, and now he’s telling an Aero, of all people.

No, not an Aero. An Ace. If he can’t trust his fucking team, what else is there? “Okay. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Seriously,” Mitsuya says when he hits the gas, “I got you, Gus. Cools- Andrew Cooley is a friend of mine, we were in the same draft class. I wouldn’t…I don’t ever want to be the kind of guy who does that to someone.”

“I know, kid,” he says, and finds that he actually means it.

Mitsuya passes out almost immediately after they get back to the apartment, and Augustin creeps around the place like he's walking on eggshells, trying not to make any sound as he pulls up some tape on his computer and settles onto the couch. Kent calls ten minutes into the recording.

“Kid knows?” he asks without saying hello.

“Yeah.”

The line is silent for a moment, before Kent says, “Come over?”

“You’re still at Troy’s, aren’t you?”

“Beth’s tired, she’s still on Eastern Time,” Kent says, “We just got back to my place. She’s asleep.”

“So’s the kid,” Augustin cranes his head to look over at the closed guest bedroom door. “I, uh…think I should stay here tonight. I don’t want him to think I abandoned him or anything. Is that weird?”

“Nah, it’s sweet,” Kent says teasingly, “And the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day-”

“Man, fuck you.” Augustin says, “I’ll see you at practice tomorrow morning.”

“See you tomorrow,” he can hear Kent smiling as he speaks, “Love you.”

“J’t’aime aussi.”

It’s not until he’s in bed that he realizes that Kent’s finally said it back. He falls asleep smiling.

Notes:

i love filler!! is this chapter good? no, in fact it might be my worst. but i love kevin mitsuya, the man i made up in my head who has absolutely zero play

i was watching the draft the other day, and it's so shocking how young they all are. it really puts everything into a weird perspective. Anyways, to all panthers fans, congrats on the cup win.

Chapter 21

Summary:

in which the season ends, and the rest of their lives begins.

There are five steps to a rebuild, and they’ve all been leading up to this. Cross yourself. Start praying. This is it.

---

First Round, Game 1: LVA @ SJS

Kent tells the team that it’s a game like any other game, but the entire room knows that he’s lying. They’d gone two years without making the playoffs before now, and everybody wants this: the veterans who remember their first Cup, the young kids who weren’t even in the show when they hoisted their last banner, and everyone in between. The whole arena wants it. His entire heart and soul wants it more than anything.

No more chasing the golden days. The golden days are here, and they’re now.

“Parson drops to Ahlgren, Ahlgren across the line to Frisk- SCORES! The Aces are hot out the gate with the first goal of the playoffs, and they’ve got a fire in them that we haven’t seen in years. This is going to be a good run.”

They win, and Kent’s heart soars into the net alongside the puck.

---

First Round, Game 2: LVA @ SJS

Augustin remembers this feeling. The playoffs are an exercise in dichotomy; the most adrenaline that he has ever felt at once, and the longest, most treacherous slog of his life. It’s sixteen wins between him and Lord Stanley’s grail, at least twenty games if not more. He’s about to play the best hockey of his life, but only if he can get out of bed in the mornings and play harder than he ever has in his career.

He would give his body, his limbs, every single part of him for this. He would take a knife and cut off a hand if it secured them victory, but it won’t. The only thing that will get them there is sixteen wins.

For the next month, all he has is hockey. All he is, is hockey. He’s not religious often, but he kneels by the bed and prays every night before a playoff game, just like he used to do in Juniors when his Catholic guilt still had a chokehold on him and he won the Memorial Cup. Kent watches sometimes, sleepy and slightly confused by the intermixing of Latin and French as Augustin takes his rosary out of its little cloth bag in the nightstand and the beads dig into his palms.

They win.

---

First Round, Game 3: SJS @ LVA

At breakfast the day before, Mitsuya casually says, “Hey, I know that this is your apartment, not mine, but if you’re going to fuck like rabbits, can you please give me earplugs? I can’t fucking sleep.”

Kent spits his coffee across the table, like he’s not the loudest human being on earth. Augustin laughs so hard that his stomach hurts, and leaves a bulk-pack of earplugs on Mitsuya’s pillow like mints at a fancy hotel after practice that day.

The earplugs must work wonders, because Mitsuya scores and gets an assist the next day, and earns himself the Aces top hat for the first time.

---

First Round, Game 4: SJS @ LVA

“A shot by Herlovsen goes wide as the clock hits zero, and the Aces complete the sweep! They’re moving on to the second round!”

They send the Sharks on holiday in a fucking body bag.

---

Division Finals, Game 1: ANA @ LVA

It really does feel like a full circle moment.

The night before they play the Ducks, Augustin clinically whispers this observation in his ear as he presses Kent into the mattress. Kent’s grown used to this by now, Augustin’s idiosyncratic displays of intimacy. It’s a testament to both of their inexperience, that Augustin just unabashedly says strange, detached, almost-unrelated observations about the world as he makes Kent see God, and that Kent doesn’t find it particularly weird or off-putting. If anything, he’s come to find it insanely attractive that Augustin can do both at the same time.

Everyone has their things, and Kent’s is competency before it’s anything else.

Augustin makes him see God the night before, and then he makes Kent see God on the ice as they play three periods of the best hockey of Kent’s life, and Kent thinks, I’ve fucking made it.

And just like their first game together, eons and less than a year ago, they win.

---

Division Finals, Game 2: ANA @ LVA

“Makela up the boards, and OH- the whistle’s going to go almost immediately. Petteri Makela takes a hard hit in the Aces’ end, and he’s not getting back up easily. It looks like he lost consciousness for a moment. You never want to see that.”

It’s only halfway through the first when Makela goes down, and it’s clear even before he limps off of the ice that he’s concussed. His blue eyes are hazy and unfocused, and blood leaks from below the brim of his helmet. Augustin hears him throw up in the tunnel, the sick splatter of it hitting skate-safe floor just outside of camera range, and wants to throw up himself.

The lines are hastily shuffled around: Bloom from the third line to the second, McCandles from the center to the wing, and one of their AHL players, Tyler Greenwall, runs down from the manager’s box and puts on his gear in six minutes flat so that they’re not playing a man down any longer than they have to. They still end the first period shell-shocked, down by one, and all looking around for Mack as they enter the dressing room.

Augustin watches Kent give a rousing speech about doing this for Makela, where the team shouts and roars like they’re going off to war. They battle out a win by the skin of their teeth, and yet the absence of a blond Swedish head in the locker room dampens any real celebration. When he’s not calling around to doctors and specialists once the journalists evacuate the room, Jeff’s head is in his hands.

“He’s gonna be okay,” Augustin says quietly, patting Jeff on the back as Keever takes up phone duty. “He’s gonna be okay.”

Kent comes home from a night of sitting concussion vigil with Makela’s girlfriend looking haggard and bereaved. “It’s bad. I don’t think he’s coming back this year.”

The media is told that Petteri Makela is out indefinitely with an upper-body injury, so none of them can technically confirm what everyone already knows: Mack is done for the playoffs, maybe even for his career, and even if they lift the Cup at the end of this, he won’t be playing for it.

Does it still count as winning if you watch it happen from afar? He’s not sure.

---

Division Finals, Game 3: LVA @ ANA

“Fuck,” Kent hisses, pain jerking up his arm like he’s shocked himself. “Aw, fuck.”

“Yeah, they’re broken,” the doctor says, drawing a line along the X-Ray of his hand: a fracture in his pinkie, and the matching one on his ring finger. “Right there.”

“Splint them,” he says. They’ve just lost for the first time, and they can’t lose their lead no matter how many clappers to the hand that Kent takes. Their momentum will stall like a freight train hitting the side of a mountain, and with Makela gone, there’s too many fucking kids on his team to get it moving again if they stop. “I’m playing tomorrow. Splint them.”

The doctor clearly has a lot of experience with hockey players, because he splints Kent’s hand without question and sends him home with a bottle of prescription-strength ibuprofen.

Augustin sees the splint when he gets out of the hotel shower, and yells at Kent for twenty-three minutes. He times it. The argument ends when Kent says angrily, “As if you wouldn’t do the same fucking thing,” and Augustin’s scowl deepens.

“Unlike you, I value my fucking career.”

They sleep in their separate beds that night.

---

Division Finals, Game 4: LVA @ ANA

“A breakaway chance by Gregorovich, Berenger sprinting back to catch him- he tangles up the stick and knocks the puck away at the top of the circle, right into the glove of Scarpello! A stolen opportunity for the Ducks, but it looks like it took all the gas in Berenger’s tank as he goes for the bench.”

“You know what I’m going to do when we win the Cup?” Kent says dreamily.

Augustin makes a grunting noise. He’s so tired that he can’t even twist his head to look up at Kent’s face. They’re lying half on top of each other on the hotel bed, still fully clothed because neither of their legs work. But they won. Just by one, but a win is a win, and it’s coming to the point where he will take what he can get.

“Ice cream sundae,” Kent continues. Augustin looks up at him, the sheer absurdity overwhelming his fatigue for a brief moment.

“Are you fucking kidding me? We’re winning sixteen games for the damn thing, and you’re just going to put ice cream in it?”

“Can’t be any worse than what I did with the Cup the last time I won it,” Kent says lightly, fingers weaving through Augustin’s hair. Augustin raises his eyebrows.

“Can’t say that and then not tell me.”

Kent tells him, and Augustin shakes his head at the end, “Yeah, ice cream is better than that, holy fuck.”

“Yeah,” Kent laughs, groaning slightly when Augustin adjusts his position, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Bring it home,” he mutters immediately, “Let my sister hold it, let my dad hold it. We’ll invite everyone over to the Patenaude farm so there’s enough space for everyone, have a big potluck, and let all the kids have a turn touching it. You can come too, if you want.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

He laughs weakly, “I’ve been thinking about it my entire life.”

---

Division Finals, Game 5: ANA @ LVA

Kent can’t grow a playoff beard to save his life. It comes in patchy and thin, peach fuzz and nothing else. He looks like a vagrant every time the camera points at him. Beth makes fun of him endlessly, but she watches every game and sends him pictures of the massive viewing parties as she single-handedly turns Princeton, New Jersey into an Aces stronghold.

Augustin, on the other hand, is infuriatingly capable of adequately masculine facial hair. He only trims it when they lose, which means that this is the second time that Kent hears the electric razor buzzing like a wasp’s nest in the bathroom since the playoffs began.

Augustin goes into the bathroom looking like a lumberjack and comes out looking like an English professor. One is objectively more attractive than the other, but Kent can’t help but long for the lumberjack if it means that they never lose again.

---

Division Finals, Game 6: LVA @ ANA

“Ahlgren shoots- Berenger SCORES! A beautiful tip from Augustin Berenger at the front of the net six minutes into overtime, and the Aces are moving on to the Conference Finals! The hats rain onto the ice for Berenger for his twelfth career hat trick, and the Aces are going to Winnipeg!”

---

Conference Finals, Game 1: LVA @ WPG

The irony is not lost on Augustin that they’re playing the Jets.

Kent’s been pissing around the apartment for the last two days, wearing his cat draped across the back of his neck like a feather boa and listening to angry teenage girl music. Augustin gives him the time he needs without much fuss. He’s still thinking about the offers, weighing them in his hands. How sure is he that the Aces won’t trade him? How sure is he that he and Kent will be able to make the distance work in their favour?

It was hard enough to have one thing he couldn’t bear to lose. Now, he has two.

The contract negotiations won’t start again until one team either wins everything, or loses everything. Augustin wants the Aces to win, not just because he wants the ache of holding twenty pounds of history and sweet, sweaty victory above his head, but because that would decide everything for him.

“Let’s talk about Augustin Berenger’s second period. Two assists, but what I want to talk about is that more than once he gets into a scrap with some of the Jets, who are intent on shutting down Parson by any means necessary. Now, when you have two forwards as skilled and fast as Parson and Berenger on one line, one of them has to be able to do some hitting, and it seems Berenger’s taken that role more and more as the season has gone on.”

“Still, Berenger’s got more restraint than he had during his last playoff run, especially coming off his phenomenal hundred-and-two-point season. He knows that the Aces can’t afford to rack up penalty minutes, and they definitely can’t afford to lose him for a game if they want to keep the momentum.”

“Although you’ve also gotta wonder if Berenger’s really willing to make any enemies on what might be his team next season.”

“Come on, we know there’s a history with Berenger’s number of trades, but if we know anything about Berenger, it’s that he’ll do anything to win. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what he does for the rest of this series.”

They win, and he lets himself hope.

---

Conference Finals, Game 2: LVA @ WPG

Augustin takes a hard hit against the boards midway through the second, the bone-crunching kind that sends a player to the ground and gives him trouble on the way back up. About three minutes later, he blocks a slapshot moving at the same speed as a car on the highway with his sternum, and collapses in the dressing room between periods. He doesn’t pass out, but he does throw up in the drain at the center of the room, and Frank and Linsky have to carry him out of the deathly silence left behind.

Kent waits in the hospital all night, even though curfew dictates that he ought to be asleep at the hotel by now. Jerome and Frank are there too, and they all sit together in the waiting room of the hospital’s VIP wing with lukewarm cups of vending machine coffee as they wait for the X-ray and CT scan to come through. Kent’s not sure why Jerome is letting him stay, but he’s not about to bite the hand which feeds him.

“Hey,” Augustin says woozily when the doctors finally let them into his room, at close to one in the morning. He’s sleep-deprived and on some sort of painkiller, and Kent has to help him put his shirt on as Jerome and Frank talk to the doctor outside, “Did we win?”

Kent takes the opportunity to kiss him on the hair, “We won.”

“Yay,” Augustin says, the syllable long and drawn out like a child. He can’t raise his arms to put them into his hoodie, so Kent sheds his thick flannel and they swap. The hoodie smells of eucalyptus and antiseptic, and the flannel is too short for Augustin’s arms.

“I feel so fucking gross,” he says as Kent helps him into the hospital elevator. His head droops lazily, nosing Kent’s hair as he mumbles, “I’m gonna kick their asses on Monday.”

He’s scratched for the rest of the series the next day. Kent has to endure eight hours of Augustin’s sober, bitter, pained sniping at Jerome, Frank, Hollis, his own body, and the entire Winnipeg Jets franchise while he silently wonders if this is the end.

---

Conference Finals, Game 3: WPG @ LVA

They lose. Augustin’s fucking lying in bed as they lose.

He calls St. Martin as the third period winds down and says, “I’m playing the next game.”

“You have three broken ribs. You’re not playing.”

“I’m playing.” Augustin repeats, and hangs up. The doctor he drags himself to angrily fights with him until Augustin ekes out the guarantee that his internal organs are not in immediate mortal danger if he plays the next game. They give him something to bind his ribs in place and clear him that night.

@espn: Berenger misses Game Three with an upper-body injury, cleared for Game Four as Aces pick up first loss of the series.

@offsidesportslv: Hearing word that Berenger will be playing tomorrow night after missing the third period of Game 2 and all of Game 3. GM Hollis St. Martin: “Berenger’s tough, and he’s ready to play again.”

He doesn’t tell Kent on purpose. When he hears the news, Kent drives to his place and yells at him for about forty-five minutes straight.

“Ready to play again? Are you fucking kidding me? Look at you! You can’t move!”

“I can fucking move, fucking watch me. Mitsuya! Get out here so we have a witness!”

Mitsuya shouts through his closed bedroom door: “NO!”

Kent takes an angry walk, comes back to yell at Augustin for another three hours, and crashes on the couch that night so that he doesn’t accidentally hit Augustin on the chest in his sleep.

---

Conference Finals, Game 4: WPG @ LVA

Kent watches them shoot lidocaine or cortisone, something clear in a sharp needle, into the mottled, bruised part of Augustin’s chest, and says, “Don’t do this.”

He had to haul Augustin out of bed this morning and help him wash his hair, and when Smitty and Mitsuya have to tie Augustin’s skates for him because Augustin can’t bend over more than twenty degrees without groaning through gritted teeth, he says it again, “Don’t do this.”

It’s a futile gesture.

The Jets must know something, because they don’t hit Augustin nearly as hard as they could. They play with honour, or a healthy fear of the looming threat that is Smitty, Cross, and Harley shadowing Augustin like a guardian angel, or because everyone and their mom knows that they want a healthy Augustin Berenger on their team next year.

Augustin gets a goal and an assist, Kent gets a goal, and the Aces still lose.

The postgame press is brutal. Kent can’t tell anyone that Augustin is injured, so when they ask what the Aces are going to do differently, he bites his tongue and gives a stock answer. Nobody asks any follow-ups. They’re too busy preparing a eulogy for the Aces season.

Augustin can’t get out of bed at all the next day, and Kent feeds him water and protein shakes to keep his energy up while Mitsuya goes on a run to the pharmacy for stronger pain medication. He cups Augustin’s jaw, presses a kiss to his cheek, and says, “Please don’t do this.”

Augustin looks at his splinted hand and raises an eyebrow. “As if you wouldn’t do the same fucking thing.”

---

Conference Finals, Game 5: LVA @ WPG

His sister calls him before the game, “Do not be a fucking moron, Gus.”

He doesn’t ask how she knows that he’s injured badly enough to warrant a call. He’s pretty sure it’s evident to anyone who has played with him for longer than a year, let alone his fucking big sister who’s dating one of his teammates, “You sound like Kent.”

“This is your career,” she says, her coaching voice on full display and deadly serious, “Do not fuck around with your career. You have ten years left at least, don’t blow it now.”

“It’s the Cup,” he replies hopelessly, and that ends the argument. She wants the Cup too. She can never win it, but she wants it so badly that he can see it as a physical burning ache in her lungs. Between him and Jeff, this is the closest that she will ever come to it.

Well, at least, that’s what she thinks. Maybe she will never play for it, but Augustin can’t think of a single person who would be a better coach than she would be. But until then, this is all that she gets.

“If you destroy your body for this,” she says, “You had better fucking win it all.”

They lose by one. Augustin balks at a check that would have demolished his ribcage, and the Jets score, and they lose.

---

Conference Finals, Game 6: WPG @ LVA

For the first time in the playoffs, they’re down in the series.

Kent has a list in his head of things that have gone wrong. They all want this, they’re all chasing it with everything that they’ve got. Their team is young, talented, and hungry. But they’ve lost three in a row now, and the boys only have survival instinct left in them.

He doesn’t realize how long he’s been sitting in the basin of the shower until Augustin comes in and says, “You made the smoke detector go off.”

Kent doesn’t say anything as the hot water runs over his back and through his hair. His whole body hurts, and he can’t move, not even when Augustin sits down on the floor with a groan of pain. He feels like an asshole, a selfish dick, as Augustin rubs shampoo through his hair like he’s the injured one, but he just can’t bring himself to move.

The last time he was here, he was so angry, and vitriolic, and he wanted to win the Cup so that he could bring it to Samwell, shove it in Jack’s face and say here, look, I can do it. We can do it. But he was only nineteen, he wasn’t captain yet, and as much as everyone says that he led the Aces to their first franchise win, he didn’t. He had Shetty, and Genie, and Hairball leading as much as anyone else.

Now, he has to lead them there himself and he has to do it because he wants it. No more excuses.

Eventually the water runs cold, and he gets out of the shower. Augustin stays sitting on the ground as he wraps a towel around his waist and rips off the plastic wrap guarding his splint from the water.

“Kent,” he says quietly.

“Yeah?”

Augustin looks miserable. “I can’t get up.”

So Kent lifts him up and walks him over to the bed, where he pops a pill from his prescription bottle and nestles into the covers with a sigh of relief. Kent can’t stand the sight of the fucking thing. It’s nothing addictive, but he still hates the mere concept of it; the fact that Augustin’s willing to destroy his body and live in protracted agony for weeks just for a chance at hoisting the Cup high, how far he is willing to go to play, to win. How far they’re all willing to go.

He knows it’s worth it because he’s been there before. There are very few things that are. This is one of them.

“It’s going to be okay,” Augustin says once he’s settled in bed, leaning against a line of pillows dividing the mattress in half. Three days ago, Kent called it the No Homo Wall, and Augustin had thrown things at him because laughing too hard had hurt. It’s not so funny anymore. “We can do this.”

“We can do this.” Kent echoes, because they can. In five hours, Augustin will stand back up, perform a strange stretching ritual that he swears helps to make his ribs hurt less, and then they will put on their suits and walk into the arena as if nothing is wrong. “We can do this.”

“Berenger to Parson- SCORES! A fantastic pass as Parson puts another one away, and the Aces have found their second wind in this series against a phenomenal Jets team. They’re not going down without a fight.”

They force a Game Seven that night.

---

Conference Finals, Game 7: LVA @ WPG

They lose Game Seven of the Conference Finals to the Jets in double-overtime.

It’s a two-two game for just over thirty-five minutes, and then one of the Jets sinks a dirty, desperate shot that just sneaks past Scraps’ pad and over the line, and it’s over. Just like that.

Neither of them are even on the ice for the goal, having just swapped with the second line, which now kneels on the ice watching the Jets celebrate their advancement. Bloom is crying, Jeff has his face buried in the crook of his elbow, and Keever is staring blankly into the stands like he’s asking God why he’s been forsaken. Cross and Harley lean against Scraps as the lights flash and the Jets skate away in sheer euphoria, each feeling as old as they are for the first time in a while.

The worst part is that it could have been theirs. Sometimes, hockey is luck.

The other coaches want to challenge the call, but Wilson doesn’t try: they all know that it crossed the line completely, and it’s better to lose now with honour than to lose two minutes from now like petty cowards.

Augustin shakes hands with each of the Jets, his ribs aching and clicking as he struggles to stay upright on legs that he can no longer feel. Everyone knows how this game could have ended, and the Jets dip their heads as the Aces shake their hands, taking their time in conveying their respect. One of them pats him gently on the shoulder, avoiding his chest and says, “Hey, it sounds like next year, you’ll be coming with us.”

His stomach turns at the thought of it. It should be this year. It should be this year.

The stands are so loud that he barely hears the words. Winnipeg is a hockey town, they’re Canada’s team this year, and they’re blowing the roof off of their joint. Their team is going to the finals, and they can all taste metal on their lips.

He gets off the ice before they can bring out the Campbell Bowl, and the dull sound of the crowd roaring is the same volume as the jet engines of the plane they’re going to take home. Everyone is crying except for him and Kent, tears leaking down their faces as Kent corrals them into the dressing room. Always the last off.

Nobody makes them do any press, and Augustin walks the kids out once he gets dressed in his suit. He makes multiple trips. Smitty and Rubenis first, the former shaking with restrained tears and the latter with restrained rage, then Bloom and McCandles, and then Greenwall and Buckley, and then Mitsuya.

He didn’t realize how young the team actually was until he counts how many have never done this walk of shame before. He’s done it three times now, and just like his first time when he was twenty, this round is the farthest he’s ever gotten. He keeps hitting a glass fucking wall, peering through it to the other side as he watches his peers reap the rewards he dreams about.

After he’s done, he throws up in a nearby toilet, pops another painkiller from the bottle that Kent frowns at every time he sees it on the bathroom counter, and goes back inside to get his jersey. He keeps his playoff jerseys when he can, like a colourful graveyard of dreams. The Aces jersey will join two Rangers and one Habs jersey in his bedroom closet in the Baie, if he can manage to nab it before the equipment managers do.

Except when he gets back to the visitors room, they’re all huddled outside the door, looking as if someone in there has died. He is so tired, in so much pain, and yet the sight of it mutes the agony for a moment.

“What’s going on?” he asks dully. Jim and the other equipment guys exchange a look with each other, like there’s a tiger eating a corpse in there.

“It’s Parson,” one of them finally says, and very gently pushes the door open a tad wider so Augustin can get a look.

Kent sits in the locker room alone. He’s still wearing all his gear, staring blankly at the laundry bin full of jerseys and the locker room covered with gloves and tossed around helmets. His hands are shaking, and Augustin feels his heart break into smaller, rounder pieces, like pebbles turned to sand under the rush of the sea.

“I got this,” he says, “Give us a minute.”

Kent doesn’t respond as Augustin slips into the room and leaves only a crack of the door open. He just has that thousand-mile stare, his splinted fingers jumping up and down with the jumping of his leg, and he doesn’t seem to notice that anyone’s even in the room with him.

Augustin sits cross-legged on the floor between Kent’s skates, managing not to wince at the feeling of his ribs shooting red-hot bullets into his muscles. He lifts Kent’s skate onto his lap and starts undoing the laces, waiting patiently for Kent to speak. The tug and whisper of skate-lace through grommet is the only sound other than their breathing, until Augustin manages to get the first skate off and start on the second.

“I knew it was over in Game 5,” Kent says quietly, breaking the silence with a mallet. Augustin tugs at the laces of the second skate, loosening them slowly. “Even though we won Game 6, I knew we were done.”

He wants to protest, but he knew that they were done long before that. Their team doesn’t have the stamina or endurance yet. Next year, they might be ready if the roster doesn’t change dramatically, but he knew the moment that their series against Anaheim stretched to six that they weren’t going to make it to sixteen wins.

But God, how he wanted. God, how he had hoped, and tried, and had faith.

“I really wanted to win,” Kent says, his voice breaking, and Augustin rests a hand on his padded knee, as if he can suck the sorrow from Kent through his palm like venom from a snakebite. The sweat in their hair has long since dried, but Kent’s blond locks hang in tangled strings rather than his characteristic cowlicks.

Augustin wanted to win. There’s a sick, gaping hole in his chest where his cracked ribs are, and if he had it his way, he would yank the stupid fucking bones right out of his chest. But he can’t, because next year, they’re going to do all of this again. “I know.”

Kent looks at him when he says it, his eyes as grey as rain clouds. His voice is barely audible, as if he’s scared to ask. “Kiss me.”

“Kent,” Augustin says softly, “Jim and the guys are just outside, there’s cameras everywhere-”

“I don’t care,” Kent mutters, “I don’t care, we could have won, it doesn’t make any fucking sense-”

Augustin rises slowly to his knees, placing a hand on Kent’s bouncing one to still it and another on his cheek. He slowly leans up, brushing a lock of blond away from dull eyes that resemble pond water, and presses a gentle kiss to Kent’s temple.

Kent buries his nose in Augustin’s shoulder and lets out a heaving sob.

The equipment guys come in slowly as Kent clings to Augustin, muffled, choked sobs bleeding into the shoulder of his ruined blazer as they bustle around cleaning up the aftermath of an entire team’s exhausted frustration. All of their progress has been erased, like a game of chutes and ladders that sends them all the way back to the beginning, except now they’re all a year closer to retirement.

And maybe Augustin’s clinging to Kent as much as Kent’s clinging to him.

Eventually, Kent sobers and wrestles his gear off, and Augustin helps him tie his tie in case there’s still media lurking outside. He steals his jersey off of the top of the pile on the way out, and if Jim sees him bundle the white away jersey under his arm, he doesn’t say anything.

He calls Swoops and tells him what happened in as few words as possible, and then calls a taxi back to the hotel. The driver is wearing a Jets cap, and quickly takes it off when he pulls up and sees who his passengers are.

“Great game,” he says when Augustin manages to ease his way into the car. The pain in his chest no longer stabs, but has stiffened into rigor mortis. Tomorrow, he’s going to start letting his ribs heal, and slowly, they’ll stop hurting. Today, he’s in hell, and tomorrow, he’ll drag himself out of it again. “Seriously, I never thought…you really played a hell of a series. You made Vegas proud.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kent says hollowly, the first words he’s spoken since he stopped crying. His eyes are still swollen and rimmed in red.

The cab drops them off at the back of the hotel, where a couple of the staff are smoking cigarettes by the restaurant’s back entrance. A maid named Kate lets them in the back way, and a busboy goes running for a bag of ice that he presses into Augustin’s hand. When he tries to tip them, they wave him off.

“Great game,” the busboy, Alex, says as he hands over a plastic sack dripping in condensation, “Honestly, man, I thought the Aces played dirty shithead hockey, but that was real shit.”

Augustin stiffens, but then Kent starts shaking beside him, and he realizes that Kent is laughing as they get onto the service elevator and ride it up to their floor.

“It was good hockey,” Kent says as the door opens, hunting for his wallet as they walk down the hall. Well, he walks. Augustin’s sort of pawing along the wall as the muscle relaxants wear off and his chest stiffens. “It was some fucking good hockey.”

Good doesn’t even begin to touch it. It was phenomenal, electric. Kent turns Sportsnet on once they get back to the room, and as Augustin struggles out of his shirt, the pundits are still talking about how they just watched the best series in recent memory end on a knife’s edge.

“I think the Aces have found something magical. If they can harness it, I have absolutely no doubt that Parson and Berenger are going to lead them to a Cup in the next few years.”

“Assuming Berenger re-signs-”

There’s a knock at the door. He’s already sitting down, so Kent shoves his head into an Aces hoodie before going to grab the handle and wrenching the door open.

“Hey,” Mitsuya says, sniffling slightly. His eyes are red and puffy, and he swipes at his nose, voice thick, “I just wanted to see if Gus…needed any help with his shirt?”

“And Troy sent you to check on me?” Kent asks. Mitsuya hesitates, then nods. Kent’s shoulders stiffen, and then deflate quicker than taking a breath, “Tell him I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

“And I’m good in the shirt department,” Augustin says, examining his purple and yellow chest as he takes the binding off of his ribs. His lungs expand fully for the first time in hours, and oxygen floods his brain. For a moment, it’s blissful to get air, and then the emotions settle into his skin like a branding iron. He throws the binding aside. It hits the wall with a dull thud, and suddenly he feels everything. All the pain, all the anger, all the grief crashing over him at once.

Kent closes the door on Mitsuya after a murmured conversation, and when he turns around, his face falls, “Shit, Gus.”

Augustin can only shake his head mutely before the lights are too bright and the sounds are too loud, and he realizes for the first time that they’re really fucking done for the year. He put everything into it, and he loved every fucking second of it, and he nearly allowed his bones to puncture his lungs and heart only to be shipped back to Vegas tomorrow morning for four months of meaningless nothing.

His chest hurts like nothing he’s ever felt and he buries his head in his hands to shut out the real world, just for a moment. He can feel the water rising, and struggles to breathe enough air before he drowns, “Fuck.”

“Gus,” Kent’s voice trickles through the darkness, soft and gentle as a hand roves up and down his back, “God, I fucking know.”

From anyone else, it would ring hollow. He keeps his eyes closed as Kent’s hands gently maneuver him back onto the pillows, his ribs creaking painfully with every fucking movement. The television drones on in the background, complimenting their game, which doesn’t get them any closer to winning. He’s chased that praise for years, and it means nothing to him now.

His season is over, and hockey is gone. Its deprivation is already starting to sink into his muscles, until he can smell the ghost of that arena smell, and feel cold wind against his skin, the clack of the stick and the cut of a metal blade against the ice. Four months of scattered training camps around the country, of renting the local rec rink to skate laps and fire at pie tins tied to the posts. Four months until hockey comes back.

He might not fucking make it. But every year, he does, somehow.

The mattress dips beside him, settling with a creak, and Kent whispers dully in his ear, “What can I do?”

Win. Win it with me. Win it with me next year.

He swallows, throat aching, “Don’t leave.”

Kent presses a gentle kiss to his brow, and a tear drips onto his skin. He’s not sure who it belongs to as Kent kisses him slowly, hovering gingerly over his torso. They part, and their foreheads press together warmly. Kent’s breath flutters over his cheeks. “I won’t leave.”

Augustin doesn’t cry, but he closes his eyes again and lets Kent burrow gingerly against his less-injured left side, tucking his nose into the crook of his neck. They fall asleep like that, and his ribs will suffer for days afterwards, but tonight, it’s all they have.

And the only thing he would trade it for is four more wins.

---

They surpassed all expectations, and when the injury report is released, it absolves them of any residual shame, except for the shame that lives permanently in the hollow of Kent’s stomach.

Augustin wasn’t the only one playing through a season-ending injury: Scraps misses the post-season presser because he needs knee surgery after a daring save in Game 3, Cross dislocated his elbow in Game 6 of the Anaheim series and has to wear a sling for six weeks now that he can show weakness. Flicker had a sprained ankle for the entire Winnipeg series from sliding feet-first into the net in Game 1, and Greenwall has a fractured foot that he didn’t tell anybody about until after Game 7.

Kent rips Wally a new one for that, because there’s a difference between playing through the pain and potentially destroying your career because the doctors don’t know you’re hurt. Greenwall was a Black Ace, an extra player added to the roster for their playoff run. He’s a fourth-round pick who’s doing well enough in Reno, but chances are that he’ll be back down there again next year.

Kent knows what it’s like to be a kid who wants something this badly, but Wally’s nearly in tears by the time he realizes that he’s not talking to himself.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper, kid,” he says, “You did really fucking good. Get a boot on that foot, and I’ll see you at pre-season camp in the fall.”

“And don’t ever fucking do that again!” Swoops calls after Wally as he hobbles away. “Kids these days, eh?”

He’s trying. They’re all trying, and Swoops deals through humour how Kent deals through backhanded comments and unfettered arrogance. The presser has them all dressed in hoodies and caps, looking haggard and dejected with their playoff beards trimmed and shaved. Augustin’s standing with Mitsuya and Keever, his face bare and hands tucked into his hoodie pockets. Kent bemoaned the beard, but now he would give anything to have it back, and everything that came along with it.

The presser isn’t as bad as he expects. Typically the journalists go for the throat after a playoff exit, but the Aces not only lasted far longer than they were expected to, but they fought hard to the very end. The only thing to critique is that their team was just not ready, something that Jerome, Wilson and Hollis admit openly.

“We never expected such a drastic retooling to perform this well this quickly,” Hollis says crisply as the Aces wait for their turn to answer for their performance. “To make it this far is a testament not only to the talent of our players and coaches, but also to their hard work and commitment to the team. I have no doubt that we will be serious contenders in the next few years.”

By the time the players come out, the press only has softballs left to lob. Kent answers a few questions about their series with as much optimism as he can muster, hoping that his sister and mom won’t call him again tonight to ask him if he’s okay, whether he’s eating or sleeping. He’s not, of course he’s not. But he will.

They’re all taking it well, all things considered. The mood is muted and somber, but nobody looks like they should be on suicide watch. One of the journalists asks Augustin what he would have done differently, and he replies, “Not broken three of my ribs, ideally.” which makes Allie smile and Smitty snort loudly into the microphone.

“Seriously, I think it should be a violation of the Geneva Convention for me to even be up here right now,” Augustin finishes. A rumble of laughter runs through the journalists as one of them stands for a follow-up

Kent sucks at his teeth, and hopes that the microphone doesn’t pick it up. It’s Ron fucking Arsineaux.

“Do you think,” he says, voice oozing out of his misshapen mouth, “that your decision to keep playing despite your injury cost your team?”

Kent already knows that Augustin thinks he lost them Game Five, the game that put them on the brink of elimination, because he overheard Augustin calling his sister that night. He can’t say for sure whether that’s true or not, whether if Augustin had prevented that goal, the Aces would’ve won. But this is a team fucking sport.

Augustin leans into his mic, but Kent beats him to the punch, “Would breaking a few of your fingers stop you from writing your clickbait articles? Because we can trade.” He wiggles his splinted fingers, and Smitty shakes with suppressed laughter until Cross kicks him under the table. Ron turns a satisfying shade of magenta and sits down with a huff. He doesn’t ask another question.

“I can see the headlines now,” Jeff tells him as they descend from the stage after the presser ends, “Kent Parson, Aces media darling, viciously attacks innocent reporter, threatens to break fingers.”

“They’re just gonna say I didn’t take the presser seriously,” Kent replies righteously, “Which I didn’t, because what do they want me to do after getting eliminated from the playoffs? Announce my intention to commit seppuku?”

“Is that racist, Mitsuya?” someone asks, probably Flicker.

“You asking me that was more racist,” Mitsuya replies.

“Right, my bad, dude.”

Augustin’s silent as they walk back to the room where all their things from the locker room are sorted into boxes for them to take home. Multiple journos asked him about where he was going to sign now that the season was over, and Kent knows they had also seen the way he leaned forward to hear.

Augustin gave the same answer every time: “I like playing with the Aces, I would love to come back, you know, I think we have something really special going on here. But it’s really between my agent and the organizations now.”

Hockey is a business, and contract bargaining isn’t an exact science. Kent knows that if Augustin had jumped up and delightedly answered that he was going to be an Ace forever and ever, his agent would put him through a human-sized paper shredder for giving the front office leverage. He can only wait and see what’s going to happen, and hope that the front office doesn’t trade Augustin’s signing rights to another team.

Augustin tells him how the negotiations are going that night, as Mitsuya, Linsky, and Smitty bang around Augustin’s kitchen trying to make dinner for everyone. He keeps getting distracted, though.

CLANG. “Oops.”

“I’m fucking renting this place, Mitty! You told me you knew how to cook!”

“I do know how to cook,” Mitsuya’s annoyed voice replies. “Parse, can you tell him to relax, please?”

“Yeah,” Kent scoffs, “I’ll tell him to relax, because I want to die.”

“I’m back! I got more bowls,” Smitty says as he bursts through the door, holding a bulging dollar-store bag up high, “And chopsticks because they were on sale, and this feather-boa thing. The last one’s for me. Here are your keys, Gus.”

Not to be left out, Linsky says, “Something’s wrong with this water. It’s not boiling.”

Augustin’s eye twitches, “Is the fucking stove on?”

“Oh- Ah, fuck! Why does your stove produce fucking hellfire, Gus?”

“It’s a gas-range, you induction-stove-using-freak.”

“We live in a frat house,” Kent mutters. Augustin shakes his head nervously, eyes trained on his precious stove. “We’re all going to get carbon monoxide poisoning. You were telling me about…”

“Right,” Augustin says, eyes still flicking back to the stove as he settles back down onto the couch. On the screen, the Jets are losing to the Capitals, which fills Kent with both dark satisfaction and darker anger. They could’ve beaten the fucking Capitals. “Uh, they’re offering me eight million for five years, et. cetera, but only a ten-team no-trade list.”

Kent tries not to show his nervousness on his face, deflated heart only tearing further. He barely wants to ask, “And the Jets?”

“Eight million a year for eight years, fifteen-team no-trade list.”

He forces a smile onto his face, “Looks like I’m buying a new winter coat.”

Augustin smiles back, equally forced, “There’s still two weeks left until free agency, and the Coyotes are offering me a contract too. That’s not too far from here.”

At that, Kent snorts, “You’re going to live in Glendale, Arizona?”

“...no,” Augustin replies miserably. “No, I’m not.”

CLANK

“Kevin Daisuke Mitsuya, literally what the fuck did I just say?”

“It was fucking Linsky this time, do not hop up my ass!”

“Water,” Linsky says with incredible panic as he hops out of the way of the overboiling pot, “Water, water!”

Slowly, the Aces trickle away one by one to recover in more familiar places, with more familiar people: Mitty back to Seattle, Swoops to Boston, Scraps to Chicago, Cross to his family ranch in Wyoming, and so on and so forth. The day after Mitsuya leaves, Augustin shows up at his door. “It’s too quiet at my place now.”

“You still have my key?” Kent says, and Augustin shrugs.

“Even if I didn’t, Mike would let me in. Do you want it back?”

Fuck no. “If Kit goes missing one day, you’re the first suspect.”

They end up on the couch watching the Capitals hoist the Cup at the end of Game Five. A bunch of the remaining Aces are at a bar near the Strip, blowing up the team chat as they vent their frustrations at the shortness of the Jets’ run. Kent hasn’t gone to a watch party at a bar since D-Day, or rather K-Day, and it’s probably for the best. He’d much rather cry again in private, with Augustin’s shoulder pressing against his.

“I think we should be a little happy,” Augustin says as the Cup makes its rounds, the light reflected in his dark, watery eyes. His voice is remarkably level.

“Yeah?” Kent says bitterly. He can feel the phantom weight in his arms, the grooves in his palms from not putting the damn thing down for nearly three hours after they’d won it. He doesn’t feel very fucking happy. “How so?”

Augustin shrugs, and his face only twitches slightly at the movement, “We put up such a fight that they had nothing left in the tank.”

“Are you trying to comfort yourself with logic, you insufferable fucking pedant?”

Augustin looks over at him with a dry smile, “Is it that obvious?”

Kent doesn’t say that he’s happy that the Jets lost, because that would be a fight he doesn’t want to have. He also just can’t say it when he knows exactly how those white-clad figures drooping on the ice feel. It’s not a feeling he would wish on anybody.

“We should go somewhere now that the season is over,” he says as they give out the trophies, and the camera cuts away to the commissioner’s doughy face. “You and me. Scraps and the old men are going to…France, I think? And the kids are all going to Monaco or something. I don’t really want to do either of those things,” he elbows Augustin on the arm, “We could go to Korea.”

Augustin makes a face, “My dad needs me to go home and fix his roof this summer,”

Kent stares at him incredulously, “For the whole summer?”

“This is me asking you to come home with me for a little while,” Augustin says, mouth furrowing nervously as he stares at the TV, “I was trying to give you an excuse to say no, like “I don’t want to fix a roof.””

“Augustin,” Kent says honestly, “I would be overjoyed to completely fuck up fixing your dad’s roof if it means that I don’t have to play any fucking golf. But you should know that if we go to Quebec, my mom is going to make us go to New York.”

“As long as I don’t have to play any fucking golf,” Augustin parrots, a small smile sneaking onto his face. The celebration on the television is long-forgotten, its only use is to illuminate Augustin’s features. Kent thinks, or rather he remembers their season like a flashback in a TV show, eight months forming an entire lifetime. He's lucky in that way, to be almost immortal. Every year, he lives an entire lifetime, and it's exhausting, but God, if it isn't one of the greatest privileges in the world.

He used to hear that he would look back one day and feel some sort of fraternal longing for his younger self, the desire to scrub up the kid’s hair and excuse his faults. He got older and never felt that, he hated his younger self for years for being stupid and cruel and naive. But now, he looks back and realizes with a start that the kid is young and wide-eyed. Still mean, still naive, but not him anymore. He’s outgrown that skin.

“Okay,” he says, leaning in so that their noses are almost brushing. “Deal.”

Augustin kisses him softly, and the future he always imagined slowly falls apart, rearranging itself into something a little bit more tangible; less stained glass, more tapestry, soft and lush. Between its threads are pristine hockey and promise, a team that doesn’t win all the time but wins often enough, and an apartment that isn’t empty at night.

Any hockey that you get to play in your life is good hockey. He smiles against Augustin’s mouth. It sure fucking is.

---

Every rebuild has five steps, give or take: identify the problems, excise the rot, acquire better assets, set a new foundation, start praying. But what happens next?

The Aces will scatter to the winds for the summer: some will stay, most will go. They’ll play around, fuck around, drink too much, wear stupid fucking golf outfits and let their noses turn pink with sunburns. They’ll kiss their wives and girlfriends and mothers on the cheeks, and promise their fathers and brothers that next year is going to be the year. Their broken bodies will heal, and their spirits were never really broken at all.

Some of them won’t be Aces by September. Some of them will be Aces for the first time in September. They’ll draft a bunch of shiny wide-eyed kids, sign a few vital parts and lose a few others, play street hockey on the pavement outside their parents’ houses and pack into hometown rec rinks across the continent for development camps with the enemy.

In September, they’ll all come back to the desert, and they’ll do the whole fucking thing over again, every year, until God or their weary bodies take it away from them for the last time. Because that’s the whole fucking point.

And they’re never going to take it for granted again.

---

@offsidesportslv: Hearing word that #LVAces UFA Augustin Berenger closing in on contract extension, either 5x7.75 or 6x7.5. Issue allegedly not with salary, but with no-trade vs. no-movement clause. Jets reportedly offering 8x8, so signing with the Aces would be a significant pay cut.

@nhl: The Las Vegas Aces extend F Augustin Berenger to a six-year contract, 7.5 million AAV.

@lvaces: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Welcome back to our lucky number seven, Augustin Berenger.

Notes:

whew! what a ride! I contemplated releasing this on the 4th, but then i was like nah. i'm impatient. This is chapter has some of the first scenes I ever wrote, plus it's free agency day, so it felt topical

i understand the irony of the Aces losing the same playoffs that the Golden Knights played, but i needed to make it at least a little bit realistic.

anyways, if you enjoyed this story, please keep following it because I'm definitely not done! You can also follow me on tumblr at 0lympus-mons for my little sketches and other ridiculous things. I also want to thank you guys for your support and all the nice comments you've left! I read them all multiple times and appreciate it so much, even if I don't often have time to reply to them all.

i think there's something else i wanted to say, but i can't remember it right now.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Double Or Nothing