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Stiles has played his whole NHL career (all two years of it) with the Ducks, but, more importantly, with Scott. They share an apartment; they share hotel rooms and rides to the rink and have stalls side-by-side and play in the same line. The Ducks fought their way to the play-offs together one year of two, and maybe they ultimately had a longer summer than they’d hoped, but Stiles had thought it’d been a good year for him. He shaves his shamefully patchy beard, heads home to visit his dad and expects to just spend the off-season chilling out and keeping fit. He’s settled in with the Ducks and it’s stupid, he knows it’s stupid, but he sort of has started thinking he’ll retire from them one day.
Stiles has seen guys get traded in all kinds of shitty, fucked up ways and he knows it happens every season, but there’s no way to brace yourself for a phone call you never saw coming. It still feels like he’s been bludgeoned with a two-by-four. The first thing he does when he gets off the phone is put his forehead on the table and just sit there, breathing, with his eyes closed and his phone clenched in his hand.
It vibrates and the opening of Bro Hymn starts up after a while, but he can’t—he can’t. He turns it off and places it, bomb-like, on the table and leaves it there. He’s not going to avoid this forever, but he needs just a day to collect himself so he doesn’t cry all over Scott when he goes back to Anaheim to pack his shit up, and so he doesn’t make a scene in front of the media.
Upstairs, he drags his striped tee over his head and pulls on a soft, worn-in one with STILINSKI and his 11 on the back. He swaps his jeans for shorts, and flip-flops for sneakers, and he drives out to the preserve and he runs.
He runs until sweat drips down his face, soaks through the back and pits of his shirt; runs until he can’t hear over the sound of his heartbeat, until he can feel his pulse pounding through him; runs until his sides ache, his chest burns, and his legs feel like jelly.
He lies on the ground once he’s back at the jeep and tries to pretend like it doesn’t feel like his whole world is collapsing on top of him. Then he goes home, turns his phone back on, and faces the music like a fucking adult.