Chapter Text
The first day of four had passed of the Penguins’ prospect camp and Derek hadn’t quite bonded with anybody else there. He had tried to talk to the one other Black defenseman, but then they had been pitched against each other in practice and by the time he tried to track him down later, it was only to hear a sexist locker-room comment which would never be heard within Faber’s walls.
So, Derek found himself at the end of the day not particularly wanting to do anything except go back to his hotel room and FaceTime Ransom and Holster, who were currently in Cape Cod, or Chowder, who was at his own prospect camp in Tampa. There were still three days to get through, however, so he forced himself to stick with the crowd who wanted to socialize.
“Ready to go pick up some puck bunnies?” one guy asked Derek and a couple of others when they were dismissed from the day’s debrief. He was a recent graduate who was on his fourth prospect camp after having been drafted in 2013, and was acting superior about it towards all of those who were new to the deal.
Derek shrugged. “Ah, I probably won’t—”
“Wait!” another rookie interrupted; this one an eighteen year old who was more enthusiastic than Chowder, and had been nicknamed Giddy as a result. “I need another look at the cup before we go. Oh, God, do you think they’ll let me take a selfie with it? I mean, it won’t be here later in the week, will it? The tour’s about to start!”
The rest of them sighed, but hung back to wait for Giddy as he asked the Keeper of the Cup if he could take a selfie.
“Got a girl back home, then, Nurse?”
Derek hesitated. The assumptions in that question were immense. “No.”
“Ah, but there’s someone you’ve got your eye on.” It was a statement, and it was delivered with such a certainty that Derek didn’t feel like he could deny it. Especially not when his mind had darted to Dex.
“Yeah. Well, we were sort of— Uh. It’s my ex. But there’s certain things— I just wish we could see things from each other’s point of view, you know? Then we could sort it out.”
“Bro. That’s some hang up you’ve got there. Sounds like you need a lay.”
Derek winced. That was unlikely. He was saved the trouble of responding by Giddy tearing himself away from the Cup. An hour into drinking, and it would be easy for him to disappear, leaving his fellow prospects to assume he had hooked up with someone when instead he could go back to his hotel room alone.
Derek frowned, eyes still closed. Why he could hear the repetitive tone of an Android phone alarm instead of Can I Kick It, he didn’t understand. Slowly, he opened his eyes, and looked up at the ceiling, which was much closer than it should be. The alarm was irritating, so he twisted around to look for the cause.
“What the fuck?” he whispered.
He must still be dreaming, because there was no way he had gone to sleep in a Pittsburgh hotel and woken up in the Haus. He couldn’t have gone to sleep topless and woken up wearing a long-sleeved button-up, but one tickled at his collarbone. And yet, it seemed so real: the way he was clearly in Lardo’s bed and it looked like Dex’s Samsung which buzzed on the top of the cupboard-turned-bedside-table. And, when he reached out to silence the thing, it was with a white, freckled hand.
“Fuck this is a messed-up dream,” he said to himself, staring at Dex’s reflection in the phone screen.
It hurt when he pinched himself. Derek wondered if that was just a saying. He was surprised, however, to find the familiar pool of fear in his stomach as he looked down the steps of the lofted bed. It’s just a dream. If it’s just a dream, why did it feel so nightmarish to be a few feet off the ground? He would wake up in Pittsburgh in a moment.
His heartbeat picked up at an alarming rate, and his chest started to hurt. He wasn’t waking up, and his eyes were fixed on the floorboards, which appeared to be spinning. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He typed Will’s birthday into the phone unlock screen.
Incorrect PIN.
He typed in his own birthday.
Incorrect PIN.
“What the fuck. If it’s my dream, shouldn’t I be able to guess the damn PIN?” he growled at the phone in frustration. His heart fluttered, and he expected to start feeling detached from the room in any second, but the feeling never came. Instead, the ache in his chest grew, and his breathing shallowed beyond his control. Three more fruitless attempts, (2428, 2824, and 1996) and the phone locked him out to try again in 30 seconds. By now, silent tears streamed down his face, his whole body trembled with the struggle to breathe. He fumbled with the bottle of pills next to where he had picked the phone up from, and eventually his quaking hands managed to force the bottle open and shake one into his sweaty palm. He didn’t have time to search for a water bottle, but he had seen Dex swallow his medication dry hundreds of times, so that’s what he did, surprised at how easily it slid down his throat.
“Stop,” he moaned, but his body carried on aching. He prayed for a blackout to bring the pain to an end.
The phone which now lay in his lap started ringing, and it was his own name which appeared on the screen.
“Yeah,” he breathed into the microphone.
“Derek?” It was strange to hear his own voice saying his name.
“Will,” he forced out.
“Shit. Derek, are you okay?”
“What’s going on?”
“I— I don’t know. I woke up in some hotel and I look like… Well, like you. So I called me. Your password’s my birthday?”
“Yeah.”
There was a long silence in which Derek expected an admonishment, but instead Will started breathing exaggeratedly. “Breathe with me, baby,” he said, and that’s what Derek tried to do.
A few minutes passed of them breathing in synchronization, until Derek found the courage to ask, “You’ve been living at the Haus?”
“Yeah, it was easier to keep my job at Stop and Shop, and get another job in Samwell than to go back to Maine.”
“And you’ve been sleeping in the top bunk?”
“Like I’d let you go up there. You’d probably fall out of bed.” He hesitated. “You didn’t fall out, did you?”
“No. Nope. Just freaked out about how I’m ever going to get out, but I haven’t fallen yet.”
“Oh. I— You can do it. Just— Put me on speakerphone, yeah?”
Derek did as he was told, and bit his lip as Will talked him through getting his feet back on the ground.
“I didn’t want to buy the second bed until you were there and we could split the money,” Will said, as soon as he knew Derek was sat on the floor, phone back against his ear.
“Don’t be silly. If I’m going to be the one sleeping in it, I can buy it myself. We don’t need to split it.”
“Derek—”
“We don’t. It’s my bed. I’ll buy it. I’ll do it today, if we’re stuck in this Freaky Friday situation. What’s your laptop password? I’ll transfer some money to your card so I can do it.”
“You— You think we’re stuck like this?”
“It doesn’t feel like a dream any more.”
Will breathed heavily on the other end of the phone. “No, it doesn’t. God, how did this happen? How is this even possible?”
Derek shrugged his shoulders against the ladder of the bed. “I don’t know. In the movie it’s a racist trope about magic, and that isn’t—” He cut himself off, thinking back to the moment when they had been waiting for Giddy. By the Stanley Cup.
“What?” Will apparently sensed the realization in his silence.
“It was me.”
“What?”
“I— Fuck. I wished we could see things from each other’s point of view and the Cup was right there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Stanley Cup, Will. I’m in Pittsburgh for the Pens Development Camp. They had the Stanley Cup there, and I wished for us to— for this. Except not this because why would this be how I would want it solved, oh my God.”
“It’s not— Stanley Cup magic isn’t real, Derek.”
“Neither was waking up in your ex-boyfriend’s body as far as we knew yesterday, and yet here we fucking are.”
“Baby—”
“Don’t,” Derek snapped, “call me that.”
“I’m sorry.”
For the break-up, or for the term of endearment, Derek didn’t know, but he bit back the question. It was probably better not finding out.
“I have to get to work,” Will finally said, when Derek didn’t respond. “I’m just working nine thirty to three at Stop and Shop today so you’re getting off lightly. Uh. I’ll text you all my passcodes and stuff.”
“You— You want me to go into work for you? Can’t I call in sick?” Derek stared at the floor in shock.
Will clicked his tongue. “And you’d be happy for me to tell the Penguins you’re too sick to go to training today?”
“That’s different! We both play hockey! I have no idea what I’m supposed to do at your job. I’ll get you fired or something.”
“Yeah, and if you call in sick less than an hour before I have to be in then they won’t bother extending my contract in a month’s time. Please, Derek, it’s not even a full day. It’s so easy, you’ll be fine.”
“Shit. Shit, okay. Practice is at quarter to ten. I’ve already got a Lyft booked for nine to go to UPMC.”
“Okay. Wear sunscreen for the walk in. There’s some in my locker for when you’re coming back, but leave it in there. Um. My locker key’s on my staff card in my work jacket pocket. Number 67. You’ll want to make something for lunch to take, too, because the break length sucks, and trust me you want every minute you can sitting down instead of walking back down to the floor to buy food.”
“‘Kay,” Derek said, though he wondered how in hell they were going to pull today off like this. “Don’t have any dairy.”
“I know your diet, Derek.”
“Yeah, but… I don’t mind if you want meat or anything. I can’t guarantee my body will be too happy about it after this long of never eating it, but I don’t mind. Just you really do have to be careful of labels for the dairy.”
“I’m not going to eat anything you don’t normally. I couldn’t do that.”
Derek wasn’t sure what to say. “Well... you put sunscreen on too, okay? And don’t mess up my hair.”
“I’m going to be wearing a helmet, so no guarantees there.”
Derek sighed and leaned his head backwards. “Right. Okay. Call me later. And text me anything else I need to know. I’ll find you my flight details back to New York and if this is still a thing at the weekend, then you can drive up to Samwell Sunday morning. What’s your phone PIN?”
“6174.”
Derek frowned, trying to figure out some meaning to it. “Is that… Your parents’ anniversary? June 1st, ‘74?”
“What? No, my parents got married in ninety-four. It’s closer to their birthdays, but… no. It’s Kaprekar’s constant.”
“What’s that?”
“I… Just Google it. I need to shower if I’m going to get out of here by nine.”
“Wait! 6174, yeah?” Derek confirmed, scribbling the numbers on the palm of his hand when Will confirmed them. “And I’m taking Seroquel at the moment.”
“Fuck. Okay. You alright, though?”
“Yeah, I think so. Maybe you being in my head will help things stabilise naturally or something.”
“Or I’ll fuck something else up.”
Derek sighed. “Don’t do that.”
Will was quiet for a moment. “I’m just on Prozac and allergy stuff,” he finally said.
“And I just took Ativan.”
“That’s okay. Can you manage the eye drops?”
Derek groaned. The idea of touching his eyes — or especially touching Will’s eyes, and them feeling like his own — made him queasy, but he also knew how red the pollen would turn them if he skipped the drops. “Yeah, I suppose.”
“Just Lithium and Seroquel, yeah?”
Derek made a noise of assent, “Make sure you’ve got my epipen in my hockey bag, but leave the Xanax at the hotel. I had it with me yesterday but I don’t think I trust those guys enough to risk it.”
“It’s only the one practice, anyway, right?”
“Yeah. It’ll be fine. Right?”
“Sure,” Will said, though he sounded less than convinced. “I’ll talk to you later. Good luck.”
“You too.”
Derek hung up and collapsed into the fetal position. It was going to be a really long day, pretending to be the person he had been trying to forget.