Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dex hated this stall.

Dex hated a lot of things, to be fair, but he hated this toilet stall in the Yale locker room the most. He had half-collapsed here in between the second and third periods, trying desperately not to puke in the locker room itself. He had barely made the toilet. Ten minutes later, he had yet to do much more than throw up everything he’d eaten in the last three days and attempt to untangle the nauseating curse that he had picked up just before the period ended from every other one.

Dex consoled himself with the knowledge that if he hadn’t picked up that curse as it was heading straight toward Chowder, they’d have to play the rest of the game without their star goalie. That did not mean, however, that he enjoyed his work.

There were two games of hockey going on at any given time, though most people didn’t realize this. There was the actual game, of course, with six players on a side and a puck that people paid money to go see. And then there was the hidden game, where players would spin curses at each other in an attempt to win. Not many people played the hidden game, or even knew it existed. At most, two or three players on each team would even be able to see or participate.

Dex didn’t have a choice, really. He was a redhead and a d-man, and the red hair meant that he could sense and work magic, and the d-man meant it was his job to protect his teammates while Bitty fired back curse after curse in the hopes of guaranteeing a win.

Most curses had a hard time sticking to him—redheads were lucky like that, something in the genes that also made them immune to anesthetics—but catch enough and even he could feel it. At least Murray, the assistant coach, understood. Murray had spun curses for Notre Dame and he knew what it was like to pick up more of them in a game than you had warded yourself for. It was because of Murray’s influence that Dex was able to sit in this toilet stall and try to shed the curses. If Hall thought Dex was actually sick, he’d never be able to get back on the ice.

The uppermost curse fell away, and Dex drew in a deep, shaky breath. That curse was hardly the only one that had stuck, but it was far and away the most annoying. He stood, flushed the toilet, and went to wash his hands and face.

“Will,” Murray said. “How are you doing?”

Dex shrugged. “I’m feeling a lot better,” he said honestly. Still felt like shit, but better. “Ready for the next period.”

“How many did you pick up?” Murray pressed. Yale’s coach had played the hidden game, and must have recruited specifically for that, because four people on his team were throwing curses tonight. Dex and Bitty could barely keep up. God, he missed Shitty. Playing the hidden game with three people was a hell of a lot easier than playing it with two.

“Two,” Dex lied. He could deflect or block or ignore most curses, but two of their players were redheads as well, and those ones clung like burrs in his skin and made it harder for him to shake loose the others.

“Will,” Murray said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

“Nine. I shed one in the bathroom.”

“So you picked up ten,” Murray said. At Dex’s nod, he continued. “No more. Deflect what you can, but don’t pick up any more.”

“Yes, coach,” Dex lied. He’d pick up what he had to if it kept the team safe. Bitty was fast and spun deadly curses, but he couldn’t shake them off the way Dex could, and the rest of the team could barely handle catching one.

“I mean it, Will. If you pick up another one, I’m benching you for Colgate.”

“Yes, coach.”

“Now get out there,” Murray said. “They’re bound to notice you’re gone eventually.”

Obediently, Dex slid into the locker room to catch the last bit of Coach Hall’s speech. Nobody seemed to have noticed he missed the first half of it, and he wondered how Murray had pulled that.

Ransom and Holster began the third period, and Dex couldn’t find it in himself to be anything more than grateful, because sitting down afforded him the chance to see the whole rink and, in between setting up blocks and deflections, to work at removing another one of the curses that clung to him.

A particularly nasty one bore down on Holster, and Dex just barely nudged it away, wincing as it burst against the wall of the rink. Bitty, who was still on the ice, intercepted another before it hit Whiskey at the knee. Whiskey, who had no idea what was going on, passed to Einhardt, who snuck the puck in past the goalie.

2-0, Samwell.

Sometimes Dex wondered what it must be like to just play hockey, to not have to worry about curses whipping past your head. Or even just not to know that your opponents are spinning curses straight at you. It seemed like an altogether more peaceful way to play.

Of course, Dex didn’t delude himself. He made the team because he absorbed and deflected spells for everyone else, because he spun curses. He wasn’t, of course, bad at hockey, but he’d never played Juniors (the way everyone got into college hockey) and Samwell needed someone on the d-line after Johnson left.

Dex suspected this was how Bittle was picked up, too. Shitty hadn’t been the best at spinning curses on the ice.

“Poindexter! Nurse!” Hall shouted, jerking his thumb at the rink. “You’re up!”

Ransom had just taken a very hard check into the boards, though thankfully no curse accompanied it. As Dex clambered onto the ice, he tried to avoid Murray’s eyes. He would do what he had to.

The redheaded forward winked at him and spun a curse almost lazily. Dex narrowed his eyes and deflected it easily. Too easily.

Like a truck, a curse from the redheaded d-man hit him directly in the solar plexus and burned like fire. Dex gasped. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do much more than watch as the biggest guy on their team slammed into him, hard. Dimly, he saw Bitty spin off three curses in a row—one for each ginger, and one for the big guy—but Dex knew it wouldn’t help.

Oh god, everything hurt. If he fainted here, on the ice, he would never live it down.

Distantly, he heard Nursey ask him if he was okay. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing against the pain. “Got me in the solar plexus, I’m fine.”

 He wasn’t, but he only had to pretend for eight more minutes. Then this game from hell would end and he could go home and work these curses out from under his skin and sleep.

A whistle blew. Dimly, Dex saw Hall wave him and Nursey in, and he barely made it to the bench. In trying to sit down, he half-fell onto Wicks.

“Dude, you okay?”

“Yeah,” Dex got out. “Bad check.”

Eight minutes took a lifetime. Hall pulled Whiskey’s line with five minutes left, and Bitty collapsed next to him. “Ow,” he muttered. If Dex could physically respond, he would agree. Bitty glanced over, saw the patchwork of curses clinging to him, and winced. “Will you need help tonight?” he whispered.

Dex shrugged. Sometimes these things fell off after a hot shower. Sometimes they needed to be carefully picked and pulled away. Rarely, they needed to be properly negated, with Latin and ground-up herbs. Bitty was much better at the Latin and the herbs than he was, mostly because things stuck to him more and he had more practice.

By the time the game finished—thankfully, in Samwell’s favor—Dex legitimately thought he might die. Yalies played fucking dirty. He stood to shake hands with their players, but Murray shook his head. “Will, come with me, I want to get your ribs checked out.”

This was absolutely something that could be done after the handshake, but Dex wasn’t complaining. He followed Murray back into the locker room.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Murray asked. “You can’t take eleven curses and expect to keep going! You’re not playing at Colgate, and maybe not at BU either—”

“I didn’t mean to take that last one,” Dex croaked. “Fuckin gingers tag-teamed me. Deflected the softball, left myself fucking open for the fastball.” He fingered the curse that had dug into his solar plexus. If anything, it had grown bigger, maybe the size of a softball now, and Dex didn’t think he could simply shake it off. If curses had color, this one would pulse a deep, throbbing red, the kind of color that hurt when you looked at it.

Murray reached out, barely touching the curse. Dex still flinched. “This one’s in deep,” he noted. “Probably needs to be negated. Do you have herbs?”

“Yeah,” Dex said. Or, at least, Bitty always had flying rowan and holly on hand, and could usually work a decent negation with those. Otherwise, Dex always kept a sprig of vervain in his backpack. If the curse was stronger than vervain, then Dex was already fucked.

The door to the locker room swung open, and the rest of the team filed in. Pitching his voice louder, Murray informed Dex that his ribs were bruised and to ice them tonight, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. There was a real chance he wasn’t playing Colgate, though they would see how he was feeling the day of.

Honestly, Dex was surprised Murray was backing off so easily. Maybe he just didn’t think it was fair to Nursey. Maybe he actually believed Dex about the one-two punch thing. Maybe he just didn’t want to fight in front of the other guys.

“You okay, Dex?” Holster asked.

Dex grimaced. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just gotta ice.” He took enough hard checks that it was believable. “I’m going to go shower.” Most curses loosened with hot water, or at least Dex felt good enough after a shower to deal with them.

Most curses loosened with hot water, but this one, if anything, got tighter. Dex whimpered when he slid a shirt back on, and came very close to tears when he bent down to tie his shoe. When he was ready to leave, he texted Bitty I’ll need help tonight.

“Who are you texting?” Nursey asked.

“My mom,” Dex lied. Across the room, Bitty saw the message and nodded. “She, um, likes to know the score.”

New Haven was only about two hours away from Samwell, but it was well past midnight, and they were all staying in a hotel. Thankfully, one that was only about five minutes from the arena. Not thankfully, Dex was sharing a room with Nurse. They had been getting along better this year, compared to last year, but right now Dex just really, really wanted to be alone.

Thank God that, immediately after they had dropped their stuff off, Nursey said “Yo, I’m gonna go chill with Chowder for a bit.” Dex had texted Bitty almost before the door had fully shut.

Bitty came quickly, a holly and rowan poultice on his arm. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Thought I was gonna pass out,” Dex said honestly—a rare change. But if anyone got it, it was Bitty.

“I’m not surprised,” Bitty said, walking into the bathroom and taking the cup by the sink. “How many did you take out there?”

“Eleven,” Dex said. “But I shed one between the second and third period.”

Bitty came out of the bathroom open-mouthed and angry. “William Jacob Poindexter, do you mean to tell me that you have nearly a dozen curses sticking to you right now? What were you thinking?”

“The only one that hurt was the last one,” Will said petulantly. Well, and the second-to-last one. Bitty didn’t need to know everything.

In the glass, Bitty expertly mixed rowan, holly, and a dash of rosemary with holy water. As he mixed, he chanted in Latin. Dex wasn’t familiar enough with the ritual to know what was being said, but he knew enough to take his shirt off and lie back and try and start picking at the curse, loosening it for what came next.

As always, the second Bitty applied the paste, the entire curse burned like fire. Unlike the last time they did this, though, the burning didn’t go away. If anything, it got stronger. The magic in the rowan and holly wasn’t enough to negate the curse, and the curse was instead absorbing the magic and reflecting it back into Dex’s skin.

Dex and Bitty realized this at about the same time. “Vervain,” Dex groaned. It felt as if something had dug its claws into his sternum and was ripping him in half. “Backpack…front pocket…”

He couldn’t scream. If he screamed, people would come running and he wouldn’t be able to explain what they were doing.

Bitty reached into his backpack and pulled out a wilted sprig of vervain in a Ziploc sandwich bag. They didn’t have enough time to prep it properly, so he did it the old-fashioned way—he chewed on it and spat the chewed-up plant directly onto the curse. With his hands, Bitty shaped the magic and tried to contain it, to direct it all into the curse. Dex, meanwhile, was mumbling the only Latin phrase he knew with any significance—orapronobisorapronobisorapronobis—in the hopes that it might help even a little.

With a silent boom, the curse shattered. Dex suddenly realized his cheeks were wet with tears, and Bitty was shaking.

“What the fuck?!”

Apparently, Derek Nurse had come back early from Chowder’s room. Dex could imagine how this looked—him, shirtless, lying on the bed while Bitty straddled him.

“Nursey, this isn’t what it looks like,” Bitty said rather calmly. Of course, saying “this isn’t what it looks like” was the fastest way to convince someone that it was exactly what it looked like. “Dex pulled a muscle, and I was helping him tape it.”

“I thought you were dating Jack,” Nursey said.

“I am dating Jack,” Eric said blankly.

“Then what are you doing—”

“Nurse,” Dex said, propping himself up on one elbow and trying to look nonchalant, and not like he was in the worst pain of his life thirty seconds ago. “Do you honestly think that, if Zimmermann was on the table, anyone would pick me over him?”

This thought clearly hadn’t occurred to Nurse. “Um.”

“We weren’t fucking, dumbass,” Dex says, more forcefully. “I fucking bruised my ribs and can’t stand, and Bittle’s too fucking short to see over the bed properly. Get your mind out of the fucking gutter.” None of that sentence was objectively true, but it was all approaching the right idea.

Nurse didn’t move, still staring at them in shock. Dex rolled his eyes. “If we were fucking, do you really think we’d do it without locking the door?”

That, at least, seemed to convince him. Dex locked the door constantly, especially on roadies. Nursey thought he was shy; he actually didn’t want anyone in the room while he was warding himself before the game. Dex’s granddad had taught him the Scottish way, and it was nigh-impossible to explain why his pregame ritual involved painting his bare chest with blue swirls and shapes.

“You’re good, Dex?” Bitty asked, clambering off the bed and onto the floor. “Lord, that game was tiring.”

“Yeah,” Dex said. With that one gone, he could already feel the lower curses start to flake up and off, and he knew that shedding them wouldn’t be difficult. “Thanks.”

Bitty nodded in a distracted way. “Night, y’all.”

Bitty left, and then Dex and Nursey were alone. “How’s Chowder?” Dex asked.

“He’s fine,” Nursey said. “Why was Bitty here?”

Dex blinked. “Because I needed my ribs taped?” He’d gotten a lot of practice lying over the years, especially about curses. And drinking. What his mother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

“Why did you ask Bitty, then?”

Because Bitty was the only one on the team capable of negating a curse. “Because it fucking hurt, and Bitty’s the only one on the team that wouldn’t have chirped me if I started crying.” Dex hoped that the vulnerability would make Nursey feel awkward enough to leave everything well enough alone.

It, sadly, did not work. “When did you pull a muscle?”

“Right after that fucktard checked me into the boards,” Dex said. “Got me in the solar plexus, I twisted the wrong way, and yeah.” He glanced down at his chest and saw a shimmering spell, an illusion that he was sure was projecting medical tape. Bitty really did spin quick. It was super impressive, actually, especially considering how drained they both were postgame and post-cursebreaking-failure. Dex didn’t spin anything but blocks quickly. “I’m going to go to sleep now, unless you have more questions?”

Nursey didn’t say anything, which Dex took as a good sign. He pulled on an old Scarborough High t-shirt (the illusion wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway; both he and Bitty were spent) and a pair of sweats he’d stolen from his brother and went to brush his teeth in the bathroom.

“You know, I wouldn’t have made fun of you,” Nursey said suddenly. “I know how much injuries can hurt.”

Dex paused. This wasn’t good. It violated one of his basic policies to engage on a “feelings” level with Derek M. Nurse. First, because it invariably ended with one of them hitting the other, and second, because it generally got uncomfortably close to the sad fact that Dex was attracted to the other d-man with, as his brother would say, both his heads. “We chirp each other on everything,” Dex said eventually, trying for nonchalant. “Why would this be any different?”

“Brah, we chirp each other on the silly crap,” Nursey said slowly. “Like…like that you exclusively listen to dad-rock, or that I’ve heard no less than five women at kegsters claim you turned them lumbersexual.”

“Turned them what?”

“None of us would make fun of you for an injury, or for anything serious. You know that. Right?”

“Um…” Truth be told, Dex wasn’t sure. Topics like his political beliefs, the fact that 95% of his family were lobster fishermen, and his “firecrotch” had never seemed to be off-limits, no matter how much he’d like them to be. “I guess?”

“You guess?” Nursey asked, barging into the bathroom. This was why Dex believed in locking doors—because his damn d-partner didn’t have a concept of “leave me the fuck alone.”

This was dangerous territory. Abort. Dex shrugged. “Yeah,” he said shortly. “Look, are you gonna stay here and watch me piss, or can I do that in private?”

Nursey sighed, punched Dex in the shoulder, and left the bathroom. Dex sighed with relief. All he wanted to do was pee, shed the rest of the curses, and sleep until Monday.

One of those things accomplished, Dex continued on to attempt to achieve items two and three. Unfortunately, he came back to find Nursey sitting on his bed.

“Move,” Dex said. “I’m exhausted. Fucking move.”

Nursey sat placidly. “Look, Dex—”

Dex was in no mood to “look.” “Nursey, I just played one of the fucking hardest games of my life,” he said a little too candidly. “I am sore and bruised and I pulled a muscle. Get off. My fucking. Bed.”

To his surprise, Nursey actually got off his bed. “Just—do you actually think the team isn’t supportive?”

Dex thought the team was very supportive, actually. Just, you know, to Bitty. Or Nursey. Or Ransom. Not to the awkward red-haired Republican with a temper problem and a distaste for bonding or feelings or whatever. At least Shitty and Bitty, even if they didn’t understand everything, had understood the postgame stuff. “Yeah, fine, the team’s supportive,” Dex allowed, if only because he was exhausted. “Goodnight.”

“It isn’t our fault if you won’t engage,” Nursey muttered. It was a testament to how tired Dex was, because he didn’t immediately jump on that comment and start their usual fight. Instead, he simply crawled into bed and almost immediately passed out.

The curses weren’t all gone the next morning when Dex woke up, but he shook off the last two that clung to him when he was in the shower. Nursey, thankfully, had not stuck around and had gone off to capitalize on the free breakfast. Dex didn’t really blame him, and he appreciated the time to get his mind on straight.

The Yale game had been hard for him and for Bitty, but it hadn’t really been difficult for anyone else. That meant that Dex couldn’t talk about how hard the game was. He could maybe talk about it being painful—everyone had seen that check, if not the curse that had accompanied it—but only at the end. Bitty was better at this part of the hidden game, if only because he rarely discussed his own part in games and focused entirely on his teammates' contributions.

Not for the first time, Dex was annoyed by his naturally closed-off personality and by the demands of the hidden game.

He packed slowly, shoving the pale blue body paint deep into his suitcase. He had no excuse if someone else found that in there; he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who painted his body in non-magical situations, and he couldn’t tell someone that it was to ward himself against the magical attacks of other hockey players without sounding absolutely batshit crazy.

By the time he was done packing, breakfast was over and it was time to load up the bus. Dex threw his stuff under the bus, then climbed to the back of the bus. Nursey was already on, with a slim book out and a bagel on his knee.

“Hey,” Dex said as he dropped into the seat next to him. Nursey didn’t look up from his book—he never did, said it ruined his concentration and meant he didn’t get as good of a close read on the text—but he grunted and passed him the bagel.

The bagel had bacon and egg inside of it. It was the closest-tasting thing to an apology that Dex had ever eaten.

(It also tasted a bit like self-righteousness and the determination to prove others wrong.  Magnanimously, Dex chose to ignore that part.)

Chapter Text

It was when they were all standing in Lardo’s room, watching as the coin rotated in the air, that Dex realized that Eric Bittle was the worst sort of person.

He hadn’t minded the coin flip idea; he was a decently lucky person, and if he lost the room on such arbitrary circumstances—well, he could hardly say that he hadn’t deserved the room.

But then he felt the curse Bitty spun hit the coin, and he watched as the coin landed perfectly between a crack in the floorboards, and—

“This can’t be happening,” Dex said flatly. He was going to kill Eric Bittle. Kill him dead. And he would shove that coin so far up his ass that Bitty would taste it.

“Well! What are the odds?” Bitty said, in that upbeat, all-too-knowing tone. “Solomon himself could not have thought up a solution more wise.”

Dex begged, pleaded. He tried to pull the curse off the coin to see which way it would have landed. He even admitted that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t live with the frustrating and frustratingly attractive Derek Nurse. It didn’t work.

In desperation, he tried to spin the kind of curse that his grandfather would probably disown him for, the kind that would force everyone to forget about the coin flip, but gave up in frustration once he remembered that he was crap at spinning curses and that he wasn’t actually getting anywhere. That was the last straw; Lardo kicked him out shortly thereafter.

Dex couldn’t bring himself to go back to his dorm room yet, so instead he went downstairs to see if there was anything to eat in the kitchen. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew that eating a slice of pie would make him feel marginally better.

“Hey, honey,” Bitty said as he bustled around the kitchen with a jam jar and his camera. “Congratulations on your dibs!”

“Yeah,” Dex said bitterly. “Thanks for fuckin’ rigging the choice, Bitty. That was really great of you.”

Bitty at least had the decency to look guilty. “I wanted both of you to live here,” he said. “I couldn’t pick!”

“You could have not rigged it,” Dex pointed out. “That would have been cool, too.”

“Dex—”

“I can’t live with him,” Dex said softly, repeating what he’d said in Lardo’s room. “I can’t do it, Bitty.”

Bitty, thankfully, didn’t say anything. He just came and sat down in the chair across from Dex. “Why not?”

There were many objective, factual reasons that Dex could have listed as to why the two wouldn’t be suited. They fought often and generally with shoving; they were in fundamental disagreement over most political, social, and economic phenomena; Dex was the worst sort of unbearable morning person; Nursey listened to incomprehensible Chinese rap songs at two in the morning even though he didn’t speak a single word of Chinese and they had a game tomorrow morning for the love of God.

“How am I supposed to explain the—the weird shit?” Dex asked instead. “Why I grow vervain on my windowsill, or why I paint my chest before games—”

“You paint your chest before games?” Bitty asked, perplexed.

Dex blinked. Is that what he took away from that speech? “My granddad only knows the Pictish way of warding.”

“Pictish?”

“Really old Scottish.”

“Oh,” Bitty said. Eric Bittle was just about as English countryside as you could get in America, and he probably had a really quiet and inoffensive way to ward up before the game. “I didn’t know you were Scottish.”

Dex wasn’t Scottish, really. His dad’s side of the family was from Jersey via Newfoundland, and had been in Maine since, as near as anyone could figure, the mid-seventeenth century. His maternal grandma was Acadian French, and occasionally fought with his paternal grandmother about who’d been in the country longer. It was only his granddad, and even then mostly by name and hair and just a little bit by magic. “Red hair had to come from somewhere,” he said, if only to say something. It was a personal policy of his to deflect awkward silences during uncomfortable conversations.

“You can ward up in my room,” Bitty said consolingly. “I grow all my herbs in the backyard, and you’re welcome to any of them, and I can help you with anything else that comes across as—odd—”

“Bitty, I like him.”

They stared at each other for a moment, identical expressions of shock and horror on each of their faces. Dex couldn’t believe what he’d just said, especially without provocation. This was distinctly unlike him; he never volunteered personal information if he could avoid it. Half the team still thought his middle name was “Johannsen.”

“Oh. Um. You like him or you like him?”

“I really don’t want to have this conversation sober.”

Bitty sighed. “I’m sorry, Dex. I overreached. If you can’t do it, then you can live with me for the rest of the year, and I’ll give you my dibs after. Just try it for a little bit?”

“Fine,” Dex said, because he couldn’t say anything else. He knew that he’d never move in with Bitty, not when there was a chance he could impede the sex life of an NHL star. His brother would probably kill him, purely out of respect for the game. “Thanks.”

Dex didn’t bring up the living situation again, and—thank the fucking lord—Bitty didn’t bring it up either. By the time school let out, he had almost forgotten the whole living situation entirely, and he had the entire summer to make enough money that he could afford to leave the Haus if things got too awkward.

In his family, this meant lobster fishing with his Uncle Pete.

Uncle Pete was easily Dex’s most annoying uncle, but he also paid two bucks more an hour than his Uncle Nick did for re-insulating people’s houses, his Uncle George did for fixing small appliances, or his Uncle Wyatt did for selling bait and fixing traps; a dollar more than his dad and Uncles Ben, Jim, Oliver, Pat, and Charlie did for lobster fishing; and nearly three full dollars more than bussing tables at his grandma’s restaurant, and the tips there were shit, besides.

There was a certain hierarchy for jobs between the cousins, and it was based on age, need for money, and general toughness. His cousin Jenny, for example, was twenty-three but had recently gotten engaged to the son of the guy who owned the Ford dealership a town over, so she was at the bottom. His fifteen-year-old cousin Piper got dibs on jobs ahead of her nineteen-year-old brother Steve, on account of being significantly less of a pansy. Seeing as he was six-foot-two, attending the Fancy School Down South, and no longer a teenager, Dex generally got first dibs.

If money didn’t matter—and money always mattered, so it was stupid to even bring up—he’d want to work with his Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave was inoffensive, as far as uncles went, but the real draw was spending every day on a boat with his granddad. Dave had given up his lobstering license about a decade ago and hadn’t yet received a new one, so in order to fish, he needed his father aboard. Dex would have loved to fish with his granddad all summer, but he knew that he had to be practical.

In fact, he could barely spend time with his granddad at all this summer. Every second he wasn’t making money on the boat, he had to be working on Professor Lin’s research work. This was the only thing that’d be filling out his resume and impressing potential future employers, so it needed to be perfect.

Dex has always prided himself on being single-minded. He committed to a task and he did it and that was it. There was no beating around the bush, no excuses, no procrastination. It would get done. That whole summer, he focused on research, lobster, and keeping in shape for hockey. He refused to allow himself to get distracted by thoughts of Derek Nurse, or of living together next year, or that there was probably a twenty percent chance that Nursey still thought Dex and Bitty were fucking.

Unfortunately, every one of those thoughts came rushing back the second he got in his car to drive down to Samwell to start his junior year. It was a really, really fun six-hour car trip back, full of anxiety and near-panic attacks. This—this was why Dex didn’t do feelings. He didn’t react well to them.

Dex would have loved nothing more than to lock himself in his room and watch calming timelapse videos of people making chairs, but unfortunately Nursey was moving in at the same time. Which meant Dex’s horror of horrors: parents.

Dex didn’t do well with parents. Practically the only parent Dex has actually made a decent impression on were Bitty’s parents, and that was only because Dex had taken, like, four curses for Bitty during the game. Coach and Mrs. Bittle respected that, if nothing else.

“Mr. and Mrs. Nurse, hi,” Dex managed with a smile that might have been a grimace. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Mrs. Nurse—who was blonde and maybe five-foot-two and distinctly unlike her son in almost every way—completely ignored his outstretched hand and went in for the hug. Oh god. Dex stiffened as her arms went around him, and he awkwardly patted her back. Dex didn’t like hugs, especially not from strangers. At least Nursey looked equally uncomfortable by his mom’s effusiveness.

“Are your parents here?” Mr. Nurse asked. “We’d love to meet them.” Mr. Nurse looked a lot like Derek, with the same dark skin and awkward expression. It made everything just that much more uncomfortable.

“Uh, no,” Dex said, as Mrs. Nurse finally let go. “They had to work. I drove myself down.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Nurse asks, and Dex can hear the implied “what, they didn’t love you enough to take a day off work,” like his mom didn’t make below minimum wage as a waitress and his dad wasn’t a lobsterman. They didn’t work, they didn’t eat.

“I told you, mom, it’s lobster season,” Derek said awkwardly. “It’s a big deal up there.”

“Oh, right,” Mrs. Nurse says. “Well, hopefully they come for a game or two!” Dex glared at Nursey. It was an open secret that, between work and their general lack of cash, his parents had yet to make a single game.

Nursey minutely shook his head. He hadn’t told his parents, or at least he was saying he didn’t. Dex wasn’t sure he believed him.

“How long was the drive, Will?” Mr. Nurse asked.

“About six hours,” Dex said. “I should go unload my car.”

“Derek, go help!” Mrs. Nurse insisted. At Nursey’s distinct lack of enthusiasm, she hissed, “He’s been in the car for six hours!”

Clearly deciding it wasn’t worth the argument, Nursey followed Dex down to the truck. “I’m sorry for my parents,” he said once they were outside. “They mean well. They’re just, um, a bit pushy.”

Dex knew intellectually that it wasn’t fair to blame Nurse for the sins of his parents, but damn, it was tempting. “So you didn’t tell them about my family not coming down?” he asked. He couldn’t help it.

“No,” Nursey said, looking insulted. “I told them your dad was a lobster fisherman, and that you lived in Maine. That’s it.”

Dex believed him. But, just in case, he gave Nursey the heavy boxes to carry up.

“Hey,” Nurse said, on their third and final trip to the car. “Truce? We’ve got a long year ahead of us otherwise.”

“Truce,” Dex agreed.

The truce worked surprisingly well. Dex started retreating downstairs every morning, and Nursey stayed in the library at night. Every time the other got too much to handle, every time one of them was ready to crack, the other would remind him of the truce. It probably helped that the team was doing very well—connecting on the ice, gelling well off of it—which limited the tension.

In January, about a week after school started, Dex got the weirdest Facebook message of his life.

Hi, it said.

You’re playing BC next week, and you need to know this. Ryan Novak, number 43, plays the hidden game, and he is a vicious motherfucker. He doesn’t just spin sneezes or nausea, he spins dangerous shit. Kyle caught one of his curses, and it literally ate through his achilles. Kyle’s out for the season now. Don’t take any of his, and be careful. We might be playing each other later in the season, but I don’t want any of you injured or dead.

Dex almost didn’t believe it, but then he watched a video of the curse in question and…

Well. You know that feeling you got when you watched someone get socked in the nuts and you got a phantom pain in your own nuts? It was like that, but worse, because if you got socked in the nuts, the pain eventually went away. If your Achilles tendon was severed, you were out for at least a year.

“Bitty!”

“Oh, my god,” Bitty said, once the video finished. “We have to tell Murray.”

“What? No.”

“Dex, this guy is crazy. We have to tell him.”

“And what if he doesn’t let us play?” Dex asked, almost too loudly, considering that there were other people in the Haus that don’t play the hidden game. “What if that asshole goes after—after Whiskey, or Nursey, or Chowder?” Because Dex’s subconscious was a dick, he was fairly certain he was going to have nightmares about that exact situation that night.

“Murray wouldn’t do that, Dex,” Bitty insisted. “But he should know. He played the hidden game too, and he can keep a better eye out from the box than we can.”

Dex had learned young that some battles weren’t worth fighting. This, he grudgingly accepted, was one of them. But that didn’t mean he was happy about it.

Murray didn’t take it well. “No magic,” he said immediately. “Nothing that marks either of you as a threat. If he doesn’t know which of you is playing the hidden game, he won’t either.”

“As much as I’d love to pretend that I don’t play the hidden game,” Dex said acidly, “I think people would notice if I suddenly didn’t have red hair.” There were other markers for magic, of course—synesthesia being one of the most common—but being red-haired was the hardest to hide. Shitty had spent eight years cursing his hair dark brown just to make himself less of a target, but Dex didn’t have that kind of time.

Murray clearly hadn’t thought about that. “Not all redheads play the hidden game,” he pointed out.

Dex snorted. It was true that some people never discovered their magical abilities—everyone was pretty sure that Ransom was one of them—but considering how many times he’d been asked by total strangers about the hidden game, he seriously doubted that it was possible for redheads. “Yeah, like he’ll believe that.”

Murray sighed. “Fine. But blocks only,” he stipulated.  “Eric, don’t spin anything unless you can’t help it. No need to mark yourself as a target.”

Dex didn’t spin curses much anyway, so he couldn’t exactly try and fight him on that, but he still hated that he couldn’t. It was one thing if you had a gun you weren’t great with, but it was another thing to go into war with only a riot shield.

Especially when you remembered that the guy who usually did attack people couldn’t either.

Suffice it to say, Dex was not in the best mood during the next few days. He was snappish, prone to outbursts and moodiness, and generally angry at the world. Fortunately, since Dex didn’t exactly get cheerful before difficult games, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help when his grudge-holding roommate was pissing him off.

Nursey pulled shit like this all the time—whenever Dex was in a bad mood, Nursey would slow down everything, take forever, and then smile that fucking shit-eating grin that made Dex want to punch him and say, “Hey, truce.” Every fucking time. The night before the game was no exception.

“Nursey,” Dex repeated for the third time. “Shut the fuck up, it’s midnight.”

“Dude, chill,” Nursey said, remarkably unconcerned about the imminent prospect of being beaten to death with his copy of Two Gentlemen of Verona. “Truce, right?”

Dex closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. Counted to five.

“Fuck the stupid truce,” he said slowly and clearly, “and fuck you, too.”

The shit-eating grin fell away as if by magic, and in its place was a cold lack of expression. “Fine,” he said. “Bye.” He abruptly stood up, ripped his laptop charger out of the wall, and stalked downstairs.

Dex knew he should feel guilty. Contrary to popular belief, he did know when he was acting like a dick. The problem was he just didn’t care, or at least couldn’t bring himself to care just yet. He would care, he was sure, after the game. Right now, he just felt relieved.

He couldn’t easily explain why he didn’t care, or at least was delaying caring. Partially because Dex was generally very bad at expressing his thoughts and feelings—thank you, computer science—but also partially because Dex really, really didn’t like thinking and/or discussing his feelings regarding Nursey. However, if he absolutely, gun-to-his-head had to explain this conflicting feeling, he likely would have attributed it to this sense that he now didn’t have to worry about his relationship with Nursey at least until after the game. Nursey hated him, which had been fairly regular during the first year and a half of their friendship, and Dex knew he could handle it. Now, he didn’t have to worry about that relationship at least until after the game.

It was likely an incredibly unhealthy way of dealing with his feelings, but Dex didn’t have time to analyze his shitty coping methods. He had a hockey game to not die at.

He turned over and went to sleep.

The game the next morning was at five, so call time was two. As was tradition, Dex woke up at five-thirty and went for a short run. The light was on when he woke up; Nursey had never come back.

Dex, always the master of compartmentalizing, ignored this. After his run, he showered quickly and dressed in a pair of ratty jeans and a flannel that Nursey hated. Dex always wore long-sleeved shirts to games. They covered up the marks from warding himself.

After spending an few hours on a difficult assignment, Dex went downstairs for team breakfast. He ate quickly enough that he didn’t have to talk to anyone on the team, and disappeared early, pleading his homework assignment.

It did not escape his notice that Derek Nurse did not make an appearance at breakfast until after Dex had gotten up to leave. Dex gritted his teeth and reminded himself that this was for the best; it meant that Nursey wouldn’t be in their room while Dex warded up.

It would have hurt, had Dex not already decided that his primary emotion for the day regarding his roommate-cum-unrequited crush (not that Dex had ever used those words) was relief.

In the bathroom, Dex stripped his shirt off quickly, pulled out his body paint and a small paintbrush, and began to chant. He knew exactly four words of Scots Gaelic, but it was enough to activate the wards. “Dìon mi bho naimhdean,” he recited over and over. As he chanted, he painted all the traditional Pictish symbols onto his chest—the mirror and comb, the double disk and z-rod, the serpent crawling up the middle of his chest, the head ending at his neck. Over his heart, he did his best reputation of the Pictish Beast. If Lardo had seen it, she probably would have cried, but the ward didn’t need to be pretty. It needed to work. Thankfully, this warding took.

Dex carefully put his shirt back on—if he smudged it now, before the symbols faded and the ward locked in, he’d kill someone—and unlocked both bathroom doors before going back into his room.

Where—of fucking course—Derek Nurse was.

There was a certain prevalent stereotype that redheads were easy to read and wore their emotions on their sleeves. To put it mildly, Dex did not conform to this stereotype. If his shock registered on his face, it was purely in a miniscule widening of the eyes and perhaps a slightly too-long blink. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up the container of body paint.

Nursey was not as adept at holding his emotions in check. “What the hell?” he asked. “No, I don’t—and haven’t ever—owned body paint, especially not blue body paint.”

Dex looked down at the paint again and forced himself to shrug casually. “Must be Farmer’s then,” he said. “Chowder wouldn’t be caught dead owning something that wasn’t teal.”

Nursey snorted. “Yeah, probably.” He sighed. “Look, Dex, we should talk about last night—”

Oh no. This violated every one of Dex’s rules: the “no distractions before games” one, the “no feelings with Nursey” one, and the recently-added-but-still-important “no serious discussions while one party is still holding body paint” one. “Why?” Dex asked.

Nursey looked taken aback, though he probably should have expected it. Dex was almost proud of the number of times he had successfully gotten out of discussions of feelings. “What do you mean, why? Because we fought, and we have to play a game today! We—”

“Look,” Dex said, suddenly very tired. “Are you going to let it disturb your play?”

“No, but—”

“Then what could we possibly have to discuss that can’t wait until after the game?” Dex asked, perhaps a bit too harshly.

“Fine,” Nursey said curtly. “I don’t know why I expected you to act like an adult about this anyway.”

Dex wanted to respond. He really did. But, again, it would have violated his rules. Instead, he tossed the body paint back in the bathroom, grabbed his backpack and laptop, and, without meeting his roommate’s eyes, walked out.

With nowhere else really to go, Dex headed to Annie’s, figuring that he could get a cup of coffee and a muffin while he worked. Dex may have considered his frou-frou iced vanilla latte with a double pump of caramel and an extra shot of espresso to be a personal failing, but he did like that it provided caffeine, sugar, and calories in enough quantities to facilitate nearly anything. Even if that “nearly anything” was alternating building computer code and spinning extra magical barriers.

When it was one-thirty, he snapped his computer shut and headed to Faber. He liked getting to the arena early. One of his gameday traditions was making a big show out of checking his watch whenever Nursey showed up, pointedly making a noise of surprise and disapproval, and then (if they were on speaking terms) asking if there was much traffic on the walk.

He was the second one to the arena—Whiskey had probably been looking for an excuse to leave team brunch early, which Dex understood—and settled in quickly. When Nursey showed up four minutes after 2, Dex was ready to glance at his watch and sigh.

Then, even though they were not on anything close to speaking terms, he heard himself ask, “Was there an accident on the pedestrian bridge?”

Goddammit.

Nursey made a sound that was either a laugh or a sigh and didn’t respond. That was for the best, Dex reminded himself. He had a fucking game to play, and a whole different one to not die at.

To that end, when they lined up to skate out, Dex took Looch’s spot.

There was always an order they skated out in. Bitty first, because he was the captain. Then Looch (Jeff Carlucci) and Whiskey, because they were the rest of the first line; then Wicks, Ollie, Skeeter (Jason Kowalski), and Manny (Noah Weissman), because they were the other seniors; then Dex and Nursey; then everyone else. Chowder liked to be last. He said it helped him get in the zone.

“Dude, what the hell?” Looch whispered. One of Looch’s best qualities was that he was almost physically incapable of speaking at a normal volume, which meant both that confrontations like this were usually very soft and that the refs didn’t hear the shit he told the other side. “Are you fighting with Nursey again?”

“Nah, man,” Dex lied. “It’s just—I got a text from my mom, and I think she might be coming to this game? It’s stupid, I wanted her to see me at the front, I’ll go back to my spot—”

Looch softened the second Dex mentioned his mother, just as Dex knew he would. “No, that’s fine. No sweat. I get it.”

“Hey…” Dex said, allowing some of his worry seep into his tone. “Don’t mention this to the other guys? I don’t want to make a big deal about it if she isn’t here.”

“Yeah, dude. My lips are sealed.”

“Thanks, man.”

Just before they skated out, Dex took a deep breath and let go of his magic. He usually kept it locked tightly down, so as to keep his—for want of a better word—aura, his magical glow, to a minimum, but today he needed to glow so brightly that Ryan Novak missed Bitty’s glow altogether. Not that magic had a color. But.

It was hard to say if it worked, but Ryan Novak made direct eye contact with Dex as they skated out of the tunnel and he had one of those creepy-ass grins on his face that serial killers wear just before they fucked the blonde girl up. Dex had to assume that, since Bitty didn’t seem to receive the same creepy death-smile, it had worked. Bitty didn’t display any of the usual visual cues for magic, so it had probably worked, at least.

One way or another, they’d find out when the game started.

Whiskey won the face-off, which didn’t matter because Ryan Novak immediately tried to kneecap him with an angry-looking curse that Dex only barely managed to deflect. In the ensuing scuffle, he lost the puck.

The rest of the first period was similarly ugly, with both teams clawing out passes and gains. Neither team scored. Ryan Novak had tried a few more times to incapacitate members of the team, but Dex managed to stop him every time. He’d caught only one, which was good, because the one he had caught had eaten through a good half of his wards.

“Hey,” Bitty said during the break between periods. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” Dex said dully. Concentrating, he began the process of reconnecting the wards so they wouldn’t totally disintegrate when (and it was clearly a “when”) Novak spun the next dangerous and deadly curse at him.

“Really?” Nursey asked. “Cuz you’re playing like shit.”

“Nursey—”

“What? He is! He flinches every time 43 so much as looks at him! I’m not going to coddle him, Bitty, not when he’s been acting like a colossal douchebag all week. Dex, either get your head out of your ass and play some fucking hockey, or get on the bench.”

Dex sighed. Took a deep breath. “Dude,” he said, raising his head. “Chill.”

If it weren’t for the team spread throughout the locker room, Dex was about a hundred percent sure that Nursey would have tried to murder him right then and there. He was petty enough to enjoy the look on his face. Instead Nursey turned on his heel and pointedly walked to the opposite end of the room.

“That wasn’t your best idea,” Bitty said awkwardly.

Dex shrugged. “It made me feel better, though.”

Thirty-odd seconds into the second period, Nursey scored off of a crazy interception/pass from Whiskey.

Dex wasn’t remotely ready for the kind of curse that Novak spun off right there. If curses had color, it would have been pitch-black. As it was, it was easily the size of a bowling ball. That kind of curse wasn’t the kind of thing designed to take someone out for a minute or a game or a season. It was the kind of thing that took people out permanently.

Dex was at the opposite end of the rink when Novak fired it off, and he knew whatever blocks or deflections he could throw, it wouldn’t be enough.

So instead, he did something unimaginably stupid, something he was sure was going to kill him—he reached out for the curse with his magic, grabbed it, and pulled it towards him. This may have saved Nursey’s life (well, playing career at the very least) but now it created two new problems: first, that it had absorbed some of his magic and grown even larger, and second, that it was now coming directly for Dex’s head.

Dex knew that his wards had basically no chance of protecting him from that monster, so instead he skated out of the path of the curse as fast as he feasibly could. Thank God there was no one near him; everyone else was either congratulating Nursey (if they were Samwell) or resetting for the puck drop.

The curse exploded against the boards with a dull boom that Dex could feel in his every bone. Bitty stared at him wide-eyed, clearly asking him how the fuck he had managed to reel in a curse bigger than his head and not immediately die from the fallout. Dex just shrugged. He honestly wasn’t sure how any of what just happened had worked, but he was very happy that he was still standing.

On the other side, Ryan Novak glared at Dex with murder in his eyes. Dex just smirked.

The puck dropped, and Whiskey sent it flying toward Dex, who passed it almost instantly to Looch. This turned out to be a good decision, because Novak crashed into him, regardless of where the puck was. Dex itched to spin something that might make him think twice, but he knew that he needed all the magic he had to set up blocks and deflections. Also, he was very sure that Bitty and Murray would murder him if he tried. And, though it pained him to admit it, Dex was notoriously shit at spinning curses. There was a reason he played defense.

It was good to know that Novak was basically wiped after spinning that last curse, because it gave Dex a chance to relax as well and just play some fucking hockey. It was not good to know that Novak was taking the time to check him as hard and as often as possible every time they were both on the ice. Dex was going to have bruises on his bruises after this game.

About two minutes from the end of the period, Novak took a shot on goal. This would have been fine, normally—Chowder was a fantastic goalie—but Novak wrapped the puck in a curse that Dex was sure would break fingers or otherwise take Chowder out of the game. Dex hadn’t ever tried it, but he had a feeling that a standard block would deflect the puck as well. As such, Dex did something he knew was stupid: he skated directly into the path of the puck, which hit him in the shoulder.

Dex winced, although not due to the rapidly blooming bruise on his shoulder, which hurt like a motherfucker. He winced because the curse wrapped around the puck shredded every one of his remaining wards, leaving him basically unprotected. He snaked the puck from some rando BC player and passed it to Bitty, just hoping to clear the mess in front of the goal.

It worked, thankfully, and Dex’s line was pulled shortly thereafter.

“How’s your shoulder?” Murray asked.

Dex shrugged, which hurt. “Like I took a puck to it,” he said. “I’m fine. I didn’t pull anything.”

“How many have you picked up?”

“Two,” Dex said honestly. “But my wards took it.”

Murray sighed. “Get some water. Game’s not over yet.”

Dex gratefully took a seat on the bench and grabbed a water bottle. He rotated his shoulder a few times, just to confirm that it really was just bruised. Thank God it was; he didn’t have time to be injured.

There was no chance of spinning a new ward. It would take him at least half an hour, body paint, and more artistic ability than Dex usually possessed during a hockey game, to say nothing of the need for a space where his teammates wouldn’t be able to watch.

“It was stupid to take that puck,” Nursey said, keeping his eyes turned to the game. “Chowder could have stopped it.”

“Yeah,” Dex said. “I know.”

The period ended with a sigh of relief from all parties. This game, in a word, sucked. Dex would bet money that even the fans were hating it.

Dex tried to pay attention to Hall’s speech. He really did. It didn’t work. He just kept thinking of what the hell Novak would throw at him next. And, more importantly, if he could protect his teammates.

He really wished Murray had allowed Bitty to spin tonight.

“Did Hall say anything important?” Dex asked.

Nursey gave him a look. “What is wrong with you today?”

Dex stubbornly refused to take that personally. “I can’t get it out of my head that something bad’s going to happen,” he said, rather more honestly than he really intended on being tonight.

Nursey sighed. “He wants you to stay on 43.”

Of course he did. Dex blamed Murray.

The third period started with a BU goal. An ugly one, where it caught the edge of Chowder’s stick and physics weren’t in their favor, but a goal nonetheless.

1-1. Dammit.

“Should’ve blocked that one,” Nursey grunted as they reset. Dex bit back a response about who should be giving more for the team and focused on the puck.

It dropped. They lunged for it.

And then it happened.

Dex had the puck. Novak skated into him, checking him hard and spinning something—Dex didn’t see what, or where—into him. The puck went who knows where. Dex hit the ground.

There was supposed to be a code of honor in the hidden game, and Dex didn’t know why he’d expected Ryan Novak to follow them after he’d broken them going after that Yale guy’s Achilles, but he had. Now he was on the ground cradling his knee and trying not to cry.

He could feel the curse moving towards the important parts of his knee, his ACL and MCL and those other CLs he always forgot the names of, and he did the only thing he could think of—he spun a block inside his knee.

It hurt. Oh god, it hurt. It hurt more than anything Dex had ever taken, hurt like someone had given his knee surgery without anesthetics and instead of closing up the wound, they’d dumped a bunch of liquid nitrogen into it.

“Get up.”

Dex turned in shock. Murray was kneeling next to him, hand on his knee. Clearly assessing damage. Dex wondered if he could sense the block.

“Get up,” Murray repeated. “People are getting worried. I don’t care what it costs you, you need to skate away from this.”

“Why?” Dex managed.

“Because otherwise it’s going to be very hard to pass this off as a minor injury,” Murray said shortly.

Dex clawed the edge of the rink and Murray’s shoulder, and he pulled himself up, shaking with the effort. He almost fell over immediately, but thank God Murray steadied him before helping him skate off the ice slowly. Dex vaguely registered the clapping that always, always followed when someone stood up after getting injured. He raised his hand, wincing at the abrupt decibel level increase.

What was it that gladiators said? Hello, we’re about to die for your entertainment? For those about to rock, we salute you?

God, he couldn’t think. It felt like there was a tiny man cutting his way out of Dex’s knee with a butter knife.

Back in the team room, Dex watched as Murray and the team doctor scrambled around gathering things. Someone was carrying a bunch of candles, the other one was holding some oddly-shaped dark chunks of a metallic substance.

“Pull your sock down,” Murray demanded, “and drop your wards.”

“My…block?” Dex asked. His wards had crapped out last period. He guessed Murray hadn’t picked up on it.

“Block?” Murray asked. At Dex’s nod, he said, “Yes, drop it.” Dex did as asked, and shortly learned that the curse hurt almost as badly as the block had. Instead of liquid nitrogen, nitroglycerin, maybe. With a lit fuse.

Murray expertly positioned the candles in a pentagon shape, then carefully balanced the weird metal on Dex’s knee. With a few words, the candles lit themselves and the metal abruptly liquefied, dripping down the sides of his knee. It wasn’t warm, which added to the strangeness.

This was officially the absolute weirdest negation that Dex had ever witnessed. The doctor was just sitting back, watching, like none of this was crazy as balls. Murray chanted for minutes on end, but Dex didn’t feel the curse snapping the way it usually did, with the sudden sharp pain and then an aching release.

After what was at least five minutes, Murray finally stopped chanting. The metal re-solidified. The curse evaporated without so much as a pinch. Dex was open-mouthed in shock.

“The fuck was that?” he asked.

“Lead negation,” Murray said shortly. “You’re up, Gene.”

The team doctor moved in. he poked at the knee a few times, had Dex move the knee in question, and turned to Murray. “It’s probably fine,” he said. “But the MRI can’t hurt. Either way,” he said, turning now to Dex, “you’re not playing for at least two weeks.”

“But you just said it was fine,” Dex said blankly.

“I said probably,” the doctor said. “Better safe than sorry. Now come on, we’ve got an MRI to take you to.”

Dex didn’t know what kind of pull it took to get an MRI night of—his cousin Lucy was a nurse in Portland—but he wasn’t complaining. He sure as hell didn’t want to come back the next day. He wanted this over and done with as quickly as possible.

The diagnosis kind of sucked though.

Dex knew, of course, that an actual strain or tear would have sucked way worse, and he knew he should have been relatively happy with a Grade One Fucked Up Muscle or whatever they called it, but he wasn’t. He was pissed. It made him want to find Ryan Novak and punch him somewhere it’d hurt. Like the throat. Or the penis.

It meant no practice for two or three weeks, and a knee brace. Dex hated knee braces.

At least it wasn’t crutches, he told himself. Even after breaking his ankle when he was twelve, he’d never gotten the hang of crutches.

Murray was at least nice enough to give Dex a ride back to the Haus, which was good because Dex didn’t have enough money for an Uber. What was not good? That Murray kept trying to make conversation about what shit he’d pulled during the game.

Dex really, really didn’t want to talk about what kind of shit he’d pulled during the game, not least of which because he couldn’t explain how. He’d just seen Nursey about to get wrecked, or his knee about to be shredded, and he’d acted. But also, the why? He didn’t think that was something he was ready to explore either.

When they got to the Haus, Dex nearly wept in relief. He was out of the car so fast, he nearly forgot to say thank you, which he knew for a fact (because it had happened before) would earn him a lecture from every adult member of the family, in age order, starting with his paternal grandmother and continuing down to Kate, who turned 21 three days ago. And yet, he half-sprinted to the Haus from the car as fast as his twinging knee allowed him. If his mother found out, she’d kill him.

He stopped abruptly in the doorway, because there were enough hockey players standing in the doorway to stop an actual rhinoceros, never mind a slightly injured and completely exhausted Dex.

“He’s back!” Chowder yelled. Before Dex could even blink, Tango, Wicks, and Looch had picked him up (which Dex hated so, so much), carried him into the living room, and deposited him on the couch, which had (clearly, under Bitty’s direction) been made up as a bed.

“Guys, I’m fine,” Dex protested. “I can do stairs and everything. It’s not a bad injury.”

“Looked bad,” Whiskey mumbled. And really, why was Whiskey feeling the need to be here at all? He skipped basically all the team bonding shit he could, which Dex tended to respect. Especially since half the team seized onto Whiskey’s comment and began to give detailed, overwrought depictions of the injury, like Dex wasn’t there.

“Goodness, give the boy some space!” Bitty half-shouted, pushing his way through the crowd of people. He had a slice of cherry pie with him, which he placed on the coffee table. “Dex, how are you feeling?”

“…Fine.” At Bitty’s look, Dex rolled his eyes and elaborated. “Seriously, guys,” he said, “I’m tired and my knee is a bit sore, but I’m actually fine.”

Bitty sighed. “Guys, clear out. Let Dex rest. And, Dex?”

“Yeah?”

“Eat the pie before you go to bed.”

Dex did as asked, partially because he was starving, but mostly because Bitty tended to bake negations and other helpful spells directly into his baked goods. Dex could stand to have some hardcore healing in his system right about now.

It took at least ten minutes before, apparently satisfied that Dex wasn’t going to explode or something similar, the rest of the team finally left, and it was just Dex and Bitty.

“So, what’d I miss?” Dex asked. He wasn’t asking about the score, necessarily—he already knew they lost, courtesy of ESPN mobile—but from the hidden game side of things.

“Nursey dropped gloves for you,” Bitty said. He grinned as Dex turned to stare at him, open-mouthed in shock, and continued. “Punched the hell out of Novak. Both of them got ejected.”

Well. That was one way to answer his question. “Why the fuck,” Dex managed. However ineloquent, it summed up his feelings quite effectively.

Because Nursey never dropped gloves. Never. He hated fighting in actual NHL games, much less the NCAA, where it was a guaranteed ejection and extra game to sit out. He didn’t even watch fights; every time one broke out, he would sigh and pull out a book, or go and get snacks, or something. Why the fuck would he punch Novak for Dex, of all people, who he had made pretty fucking clear he wasn’t a fan of today?

Bitty shrugged. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask himself.” He stood, grabbed the plate, and began walking toward the kitchen before clearly thinking better of it and spinning around. “But, then again, I’d tell you that even if I did know.”

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Dex said crossly.

Nursey had dropped gloves for him. What the hell was happening to the world?

Chapter Text

“I talked with Peterson,” Murray said. “We’re holding a total negation on Friday.”

“A total negation?” Bitty asked, dismay clearly evident in his voice. “Against the BC guy?”

Dex had heard of total negations, but only in the vaguest, “this can sometimes happen but as long as you don’t kill someone, you’ll be fine.” It meant forcibly severing someone’s connection to their magic, making it so that they could never play the hidden game again.

It was also hard as shit to pull off, not least of which because you had to have thirteen people to do it properly.

“Doesn’t this seem a bit excessive?” Dex asked. “I mean, I’m fine and Kyle will be.” The only good thing about injuries via curse was that they tended to heal without (many) complications.

“Normally, I’d agree with you,” Murray said. “But I rewatched McCray’s hit. The curse only grazed him, and he had wards up. If he’d taken it full-on, he’d likely never walk again. Not to mention the monstrosity Novak threw at Nurse.”

 Dex had blocked that incident out of his mind for sheer self-preservation. The last thing he needed was an in-depth look at why and how he’d pulled that curse away. “So with us and Yale’s crew,” Dex asked instead, “how many more guys will you need?”

“Neither you nor McCray will be spinning,” Murray said sharply. “Not after you’re both bearing the scars from those curses and from lead negations. One would be bad enough, to try it with both would be suicide.”

“Fine,” Dex said, biting back anger. Murray was the expert here, and, from what he’d heard about total negations, doing one improperly could and had led to explosions. “How many people do we need, then?”

“Seven,” Murray said. “Six, if Knight gets back to me.”

“What about Johnson?” Bitty asked.

“Received an email from him this morning, before I even asked. He said something about an obscure connection that’ll be fun to speculate on later?” Murray said, confused. From what Dex had heard, that was classic Johnson. “Also, he’s in West Virginia right now. I hadn’t even emailed him yet.”

“I can ask the volleyball team,” Dex said. “Chowder’s girlfriend spins for them.” Caitlin Farmer didn’t even need to spin; she was six feet tall and intimidated other people through her sheer badassery. But when someone did feel the need to spin things at her team, Farmer tended to destroy them. “I think they have two or three people who play.”

“That’s a start, though I’d feel more comfortable with people who played hockey,” Murray said. “I don’t want any reason for this negation to go sideways. The Yale guys are asking their alums and friends as well, so reach out to who you know, but don’t worry if they can’t make it.”

Since neither Dex nor Bitty had played hockey in this state, finding hockey players with enough talent and willingness to perform a total negation was going to be very difficult. Especially because those few players Dex did know generally hated him on principle.

“If we get very, very desperate,” Bitty said slowly, “and I mean very desperate, y’all, I may be able to ask a few guys on the Falconers.”

Dex was very surprised that Bitty was offering; he usually tried to play off his Falconers connection as much as humanly possible. It was probably a sign of how serious Bitty was taking the whole thing. Dex still thought this was unnecessary.

That didn’t stop him from seeking Farmer out afterwards and explaining the whole situation. She agreed quickly, before Dex had even pulled up the video. It was a little unnerving, actually, but Dex decided not to ask questions. Farmer was kind of terrifying, and she was the kind of person who you’d thank after she beat the crap out of you.

On Monday, Yale confirmed that they’d be bringing two guys from Brown.

On Tuesday, after Murray grudgingly allowed non-hockey players, Farmer recruited the team’s libero, a sophomore named Hali who spun some of the tightest curses Dex had ever seen.

On Wednesday, Bitty called Alexei Mashkov. In seconds, Mashkov and Putowski confirmed that they’ll be there on Friday, as soon as their game was over.

On Friday, everything went to shit.

“Hali can’t make it tonight,” Farmer said as she brushed her teeth in the bathroom. Dex winced, turning to see if either Chowder or Nursey had heard through the open doors. “Her cat died. She went home.”

“Well, fuck,” Dex said softly, attempting to shave what little hair actually grew on his face. “Know anyone else?”

“Well, I’d ask Jacobs, but he’s fucking terrified of you.” Farmer spat and rinsed her brush. “Most football players are.”

“Me?” Dex asked, kind of offended. Tyler Jacobs, an offensive lineman, was fully six-four and outweighed Dex by at least forty pounds. “Why? I don’t even talk to—”

Farmer shrugged. “Look, don’t blame me because Tyler doesn’t like you. I do like you. Can’t you ask anyone?”

There were, of course, other people on campus that Dex knew played the hidden game. It was just that Dex didn’t really talk to them. He hadn’t had classes with most of them, and other than the whole “magic” thing, they didn’t have a lot in common. Even those who Dex would consider “friends” (or, at least, “acquaintances”), he wouldn’t feel comfortable asking them to permanently negate a guy.

Hell, he’d only felt comfortable asking Farmer because the guy tried to break her boyfriend’s fingers.

“I’ll tell Bitty and Murray,” Dex said.

Farmer nodded. They finished getting ready in relative silence before breaking off—Dex to go tell Bitty, and Farmer to go to class.

“Let me text Tater,” Bitty said. “He might know someone else.”

“Should we tell Murray?” Dex asked. “In case he knows someone?”

Bitty nodded. “Especially if Tater can’t—oh, he responded. He said he’ll bring a third. Bless that man.”

“I still think this is stupid,” Dex said.

Bitty raised an eyebrow. “Do you think the negation is stupid, or that you can’t participate is stupid?”

“Both,” Dex said honestly. It almost felt like Bitty was the only person he could be honest around sometimes. “Do you actually think it’s necessary?”

Bitty paused, really considered the question. “Yes and no,” he said. “I called my mama after Murray suggested it, to get her take on it. I don’t know if we’ve just been lucky with everything, or if he hasn’t actually aimed for destruction. But at the end of the day, I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

“This is someone’s magic, though,” Dex said. “It’s—like—taking away their personality or something?”

Bitty nodded. “It’s a decision you’ve got to make. For me, I thought about what it would be like to catch what the Yalie caught, and how that could very well ruin his career. Not to mention whatever you pulled back from Nursey. Those weren’t safe spells.”

Dex sighed. Speaking of things that he didn’t want to talk about… “I guess,” he said. “It’s just—”

“You don’t have to come, Dex. Not if it’s not what you believe is right.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dex said. “I just—I wish—this doesn’t make sense, but if I have to be complicit in taking someone’s magic—and I am—I wish it were more concrete. None of this sidelines crap.”

Bitty patted his shoulder. “It makes perfect sense to me,” he said. “Now get out and go to class, honey, you don’t want to be late.”

Dex bit back a retort about Bitty’s own class habits that would have invariably lost him pie privileges for a week and left.

It really pissed him off that the Falconers had a game that night, so the negation wasn’t going to be until around midnight. Dex hated midnight. If he had his way, he’d be asleep at ten every night, and be grateful for it. If it were anything else, he’d probably skip, blame his knee and avoid socializing. But he knew that he owed it to Ryan Novak to watch, and he knew that he’d never forgive himself if he wasn’t present.

Dex was also a realist, so at around 7, he went to Annie’s and ordered a venti iced vanilla latte with a double pump of caramel and an extra shot of espresso. He was going to hate himself, but at least he was going to hate himself awake.

“The hell are you trying to get past 10 for?” Nursey asked as Dex walked into the Haus with his coffee. It turned out that living together made people very aware of their roommate’s habits.

Dex ran through a variety of scenarios. It was a Friday, so studying was unbelievable. If he said he was going out, Nursey would invariably want to tag along. “I have a date,” he said.

“Ooh! With who?” Chowder asked.

“Kyle,” Dex said, then mentally kicked himself.

It wasn’t fair to call Dex “in the closet,” because he wasn’t technically hiding anything. But it also wasn’t fair to call him “out,” because he went to great lengths to avoid discussing most aspects of his personal life, including the fact that he occasionally liked guys. And this, he knew, was about to become A Thing.

“Kyle?” Nursey asked, in a tone of great surprise. Dex gritted his teeth. “You’re going on a date with a guy?”

“Yup,” Dex said succinctly.

“Why didn’t you tell us you liked guys?” Chowder asked. “I totally would have set you up with Brendan on the football team if I’d known!”

Dex shrugged. “Never came up.” He paused. “Wait, Brendan Knowles? Chowder, that guy hates me.” This was not wholly accurate. Brendan, a safety on the football team who played the hidden game, tended to treat Dex with the same caution (and, yes, fear) one might use with a nuclear bomb.

“Well, every time Farmer and I see him, he asks about you!”

Goddammit. Why was the football team so weird around him? He’d never once attacked them with a fire extinguisher, like Jack had. He should really try to figure that out at some point.

“Whatever,” Dex said, making his way upstairs.

To his dismay, Nursey followed him. “Be honest, Dex. What’s the real reason you didn’t tell us? Because you don’t think we’re supportive?”

“Not that this is about you,” Dex said, trying to remain (relatively) calm, “but I wasn’t lying. It literally never came up.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m gonna try and ignore that you’re attacking my coming-out narrative right now,” Dex said slowly. “But since you’re so interested in my sex life, I’ll spell it out for you. I don’t like most people, and I tend to swing about 80-20 chicks. So, no, I haven’t thought it was important to bring up before now.”

Nursey, if possible, looked even more surprised. Dex tried to ignore his gleeful pleasure at seeing him so off his “chill” game. “Are you demisexual?” he asked.

Dex sighed. He wasn’t staying here anymore. “No,” he said decisively. “I’m an asshole.”

Dex neither knew nor cared what labels could be associated with his sexuality. He liked who he liked, he didn’t like who he didn’t like, and he didn’t really give a shit what people called it. He did, however, quite enjoy shutting Nursey up at every opportunity. He couldn’t help himself.

He picked his backpack back up and left, not really sure where he was heading until he ended up at the library.

Dex hated the library. It was too large and sterile, and he never managed to find a comfortable chair. Plus, it reeked of stress the way only a building around midterms could. Not that midterms were happening just yet, because it was barely February, but it still had that stench.

But since he was here, he might as well try and get some work done. He had a problem set he could work on that was due Tuesday, so at least he’d be a bit productive.

It took him the entire four and a half hours before he had to leave to solve two (of five) problems, so suffice it to say, Dex managed to leave the library in an even worse mood than when he got there. He hated everything, especially algorithms.

He ran into Farmer on the way there. “Hey,” she said, uncharacteristically curt.

“Hey,” Dex said, equally curt. He really, really didn’t want to do this.

They weren’t the last people to Faber, but they were close. Yale and Brown were already there, in two very distinct clumps, except for Yale’s coach, who was discussing something with Murray. Bitty and Shitty were off to the side, and Dex headed towards them. Farmer followed.

“You don’t think they bailed, do you?” Bitty asked, clearly very worried.

“Brah, no. They wouldn’t do that. Media shit probably ran long. What time did Jack text you?”

“A little over an hour ago…” Bitty said.

“See? It takes time. Dex! How the hell are you?”

“Fine.”

“Really?” Shitty asked, giving him a hard stare. Dex had always had a hard time lying to Shitty; he found this trait endlessly frustrating.

“No.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

Dex shook his head. “Nope.”

“Fair enough. This is going to suck enough without airing dirty laundry and all that shit. Hey, Farmer. How are you doing?”

Farmer shrugged. “I’ve been better, I think. It just hit me on the walk over how very permanent this is.”

“For fucking real,” Shitty agreed. “You’d think Murray would let me light up in here?”

“No,” Bitty and Dex said in unison.

“But—”

They were saved further diatribes on weed thanks to the timely arrival of Alexei Mashkov, Mike Putowski, and…was that Kent Parson? Holy crap.

“Sorry we are late,” Mashkov said, uncharacteristically surly. “We had some…difficulties.” With this last comment, he shot a venomous glare at Kent Parson, who looked distinctly unhappy to be there. Putowski just looked tired. Dex wondered what the car ride up must have been like.

“Now that everyone’s here, let’s get started,” Murray said. Dex took that as his cue to head out. Murray had explained how important it was that preparations were perfect, and since Dex wasn’t participating in the actual ritual bit, he didn’t want to disrupt something. The guy in a Yale sweatshirt and on crutches, who Dex had to assume was Kyle McCray, followed.

“Kyle, right?” Dex asked as they headed to the rinkside seats.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “You’re…fuck.”

“Will,” Dex supplied. “But I go by Dex.”

“Right. Dex. You’re the one who—”

Dex fully expected him to say something to the effect of “got kneecapped by Novak” or “took all our curses last year” or, hell, “has hair that can be seen from space” (due to rather unfortunate timing with regard to Google Earth).

“—they call Deadpool.”

What. The. Actual. Living. Fuck.

Dex actually had to stop walking for a second, which was a blessing in disguise. Even at his slowest speed, he was outpacing McCray. “The fuck?” he asked intelligently.

“Deadpool. You know, cuz you take fucking nukes of curses and look like you don’t even feel them.” Dex didn’t—couldn’t respond just yet, so McCray kept talking. “Like, last year, we threw a good six curses at you that were supposed to take you out, and you didn’t look like you felt any of them.”

“Well, not all of them stuck,” Dex said.

“No, that was the weird thing. Cuz it was Kinney and Janx doing most of the throwing, and they’re ginger, too. What are you, a seventh or some shit?”

This was a lot to take in, and not just because he wasn’t sure if that seventh crack was another Weasley joke. “I have one brother,” Dex said, just to say something. He wasn’t a hundred percent about his dad—it was really hard to remember which aunt and uncle went where—but he was pretty sure that his dad was the fourth of five children (two girls, three boys). “I’m not some—savant, or whatever, I just ward up before games.”

“Yeah, so do the rest of us,” McCray said. “Same as you, probably, I know I use Irish shit too, and that fucker Novak’s curse ripped through all my wards and still tore my Achilles. How many of his did you take?”

Dex took a deep breath and tried to ignore that this guy thought he was Irish. “Three,” he said. “But they probably weren’t as strong as whatever he spun at you.”

“Either that, or you’re a freaking Deadpool,” McCray mumbled. Dex pretended not to hear him. They walked the rest of the way in silence, taking seats as close to center line as possible.

It was around center ice that the thirteen people circled up. Murray was facing them; Farmer and Parson had their backs to them.

Dex didn’t know to what culture this negation belonged, but it was fucking weird. First Murray produced a silver knife and cut his right palm with it, then slashed Bitty’s left palm. Then Bitty took the knife in his (bloody) left hand and cut his own right hand and Shitty’s left. This went all the way around the circle until the Yale coach had cut Murray’s own left hand.

“Sweet,” McCray said. “A blood negation.”

A blood negation, because that was apparently a thing. Dex already felt nauseous.

The Yale coach then took the bloody knife and plunged it into the ice at Murray’s feet, and the thirteen people all grabbed hands and began chanting. Dex didn’t recognize the language they were using at all, but it seemed like they kept saying the same things over and over. After about thirty seconds of chanting, the ghostly form of Ryan Novak appeared in the center of the circle.

He didn’t look angry. As he slowly turned in a circle, Dex caught a glimpse of his face, and he looked absolutely terrified. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Dex muttered. He felt hot, like he was about to burst out of his skin. This was wrong. This was so wrong.

McCray turned to stare at him in shock. “Like hell we shouldn’t,” he said. “That guy tried to fucking cripple me—and you, too—and you want to just let him go?”

“What if we did this to you?” Dex asked.

McCray scoffed. “I don’t try to kill people during games.”

Though that wasn’t Dex’s point, he stayed quiet. He couldn’t bring himself to talk, not when Ryan Novak was openly sobbing.

After what seemed like hours, they stopped chanting. The blade had, at some point, disappeared, as had all the blood on the ice. With a final, wrenching, silent shriek, Novak’s ghost or astral projection or whatever faded.

Dex thought he was going to vomit. He wasn’t sure of much at that moment, but he knew that he absolutely could not stay here as everyone congratulated each other and celebrated what they just did. So he left, ran home as fast as his twinging knee would allow him.

“Oh, hey,” Nursey said as Dex half-sprinted into the room, still wild-eyed and shaking slightly. “How was the date?”

Oh, goddammit. The date. The lie. “Bad,” Dex said shortly. He kicked off his shoes and tossed his jacket vaguely in a corner. His backpack was still in Faber. Fuck.

“Hey, are you okay? Did he—”

“I’m fine,” Dex said, some annoyance breaking through his numbness. “It was just a shitty date.”

“You don’t look fine,” Nursey said. “Seriously, you can tell me if something’s wrong. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

Dex took a moment from searching for his pajama bottoms. “We’re friends. I really don’t want to talk.”

Suddenly, there was a hand on his shoulder that was guiding him into the bottom bunk. “Hey, it’s chill,” Nursey said. “You put these on—” and suddenly there was a set of flannel pajamas in his hands that he knew weren’t his, both because his pajamas tended to be old pairs of sweats and free t-shirts from basketball games and because they had a really fucking large Ralph Lauren polo guy on the pocket, “and I am going to get you some water. Do you want something to eat? A cookie? A granola bar?”

“No,” Dex said hoarsely. The hell? Was happening? “Thank you.”

“Okay,” Nursey said. “You get changed. I’ll be right back.”

Dex put on the pajamas, because they were in front of him, because they were the softest things he’d felt in a while. Because they smelled vaguely like Nurse’s weird, all-natural laundry detergent, because apparently people with money were too good for fucking Tide.

“I got you some water,” Nursey said as he came through the door. “I also grabbed some cookies, because Bitty made the snickerdoodles with the caramel inside. You should def have some water, but I won’t complain if you didn’t have a cookie and I ate all of them myself.”

Dex sat down hard on the lower bunk bed, which was of course Nursey’s, and Nursey handed him the glass of water and a cookie. He mechanically took a bite, washing it down with some water.

Nursey took a seat next to him, also eating a cookie. Dex couldn’t help but notice that he had an additional two cookies in his left hand. “So,” he said. “We’re not talking about it, but I’ve gotta ask. Do I have to go beat someone up tomorrow?”

Dex shook his head. “Heard you already did that last week.”

“Oh,” Nursey said, suddenly awkward. “They, uh, told you about that.”

To buy himself some time, Dex took another bite of his cookie. It was a really good cookie; Nursey hadn’t been lying. “Bitty mentioned it,” he said.

“Well, that guy was a dick,” Nursey said. “He deserved it.”

This had been a mistake. A really fucking big one. Dex froze, cookie halfway to his mouth, and just tried to breathe. It…wasn’t really working.

“Seriously, dude, are you okay?” Nursey asked. “Like, we aren’t talking about it, but I’m starting to get a little freaked out.”

Dex shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said, then winced internally when he heard how that sounded. “Not—I meant literally, you literally wouldn’t understand—”

“It’s chill,” Nursey said, sounding falsely upbeat. “I get it. Hey, you should get some rest. I’ll get the lights.”

Dex stood and climbed the ladder to his bed. He sure as shit didn’t trust Nursey on the top bunk. There were easier ways to kill them both. As soon as he made it into bed and laid down properly, Nursey flicked off the lights, and, to his surprise, Dex fell asleep quickly.

Chapter Text

Dex woke up at 7:45, which was incredibly late for him and incredibly early for almost every other college kid. He’d have loved to go for a run, but the physical therapist had looked at him like he was high when he suggested it at their last meeting.

Instead, Dex climbed down the ladder as quietly as he could and went the bathroom. He needed a shower badly, needed to scrub away the magical residue of last night. He stayed in the shower for as long as he could justify using up the hot water, which, since Dex’s brother used to threaten physical violence if the shower ran out of hot water, was about ten minutes.

When he came back into the room, his phone was ringing. Who the hell was calling him this early? He’d talked to his mom yesterday, and his dad always texted to make sure it was a good time.

“Hello?” Dex asked. He had answered the phone so quickly, trying to keep Nursey from waking up, that he hadn’t checked the caller ID.

“Will, good. You’re awake.”

“…Coach Hall?” Dex wasn’t positive, but he was pretty sure that the last time Hall had called him was during recruitment. What the hell?

“Can you come to my office? As soon as possible? We have...something to discuss.”

Well, that wasn’t weird and uncomfortable at all. “Yeah, I’ll be there in fifteen,” Dex said. “Why?”

“I think it’s best to cover in person,” Hall said, like this situation wasn’t already cryptic enough.

“Okay,” Dex said. “I’ll be there soon.” He hung up and went to look for a decently clean pair of jeans.

“Who was that?”

Damn. He didn’t want Nursey to wake up. Nursey got pissy when he woke up before ten. “It was Hall,” Dex said. “Wants me up at Faber for something.”

Nursey blinked. “We don’t have practice, do we?”

Dex shook his head. “It’s probably something with my knee,” he said. “Sorry for waking you up.” He fished his jeans off the floor, grabbed a random shirt from his drawer, and went back to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

He was out the door in four minutes and at Faber in fourteen. His knee was twinging again, but Dex didn’t have time to worry about that. He shook out his leg and marched up to Hall’s office, trying very hard not to limp.

Hall opened the door the second Dex knocked, and he looked weirdly…relieved…to see him. “Will. I’m glad you could make it so quickly. Come in.”

Dex would have loved to hesitate, but Hall practically dragged him into the office, where there was a man waiting in a black suit. He was probably sixty-five, with a shock of white hair and a very cold-looking expression.

“Did someone die?” Dex asked warily. He was ninety percent sure that no one in his family could afford a lawyer, but, hell, maybe his great-aunt Helen had inherited more than just that shitty boat from her fourth husband.

Hall chuckled awkwardly. “Roy, this is Will Poindexter, number 24. Will, this is Roy Koenig, the general manager of the Las Vegas Aces.”

What the actual hell was happening? Dex was a realistic person. He knew exactly how good a hockey player he was, and it sure as shit wasn’t “NHL-caliber.” He was NCAA-caliber, and that was it.

“I’ll leave you two to discuss,” Hall said, practically fleeing his office. The door swung shut behind him.

Roy Koenig smiled at Dex, which only made him more uncomfortable, if that was possible. “Will Poindexter.”

“Hi,” Dex said awkwardly.

And then Roy Koenig spun a curse off so fast, Dex almost didn’t see it.

What the hell? Dex barely managed to deflect it, the curse skittering on his deflection and hitting the wall behind him.

“I’m impressed,” Koenig said, nodding to himself. “I heard you were fast, but I didn’t expect you to be quite this fast. They say you can catch almost anything, too. Is that true?”

Dex sighed. “Apparently.”

“What are you, Irish?” he asked.

“French,” Dex said, just to be contrary. He knew that Koenig was trying to figure out how he warded up, which was decidedly not French, but he was seriously tired of people assuming red hair=Irish. Not that it mattered, because Roy Koenig wasn’t the kind of person to react to anything Dex was saying. He probably could have said Papua New Guinean and gotten the same response.

“Have you considered playing in the NHL?”

“I’m not good enough to play for the NHL,” Dex said frankly. “Can we just—cut the crap?”

Koenig smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Fine. Let’s talk frankly. We need someone on the defensive line who can block for Parson, and they say you’re the best. What do you say?”

Who was saying this shit? Dex knew he wasn’t any better than other people who played the hidden game, barring a slight potential skill at taking curses that went beyond his natural redhead immunity. And, anyway, he couldn’t spin curses with any sort of speed or competence.

“And how would you explain my presence on the team?” Dex asked. “I’m not good enough to make it properly, and I won’t spin from the box.” The hidden game had, at least in college, a sort of a code of honor that was associated with it, and the most important rule was that only players (those on the bench) spun, not coaches or staff (the box).

“Leave that to me,” Koenig said. “Are you in or out?”

Dex had never wanted to play pro hockey. When other kids were talking about their dream teams (and, as they were from Maine, it was invariably the Bruins), Dex was figuring out how he was going to pay for college, get a high-paying job that would allow him to live in financial comfort for the rest of his days, and retire at 65.

“Sorry,” Dex said. He already had an internship lined up, with a company that would actually give him a career chance, and a shitty year in the NHL (or, more realistically, the AHL or some farm team) weren’t worth it, not with how fast his current knowledge would become useless and he’d be a degree-less bum. “Find someone else.” He turned to leave.

“One-point-three million dollars.”

Dex paused, hand on the doorknob. “Excuse me.”

“Two-year contract,” Koenig said. “Worth over a million dollars. Six hundred fifty thousand a year. Ten percent signing bonus in cash.”

Dex wanted to leave. He really, really wanted to leave. But $1.3 million was not something to easily walk away from. “I’m not worth that much,” he said flatly.

“Keeping the rest of my team free from injuries and curses is. I’d sign you longer if it weren’t illegal,” Koenig said flatly. “Don’t be stupid, Will. You’re the first member of your family to go to college, first one to get out of that streetlight you call a hometown. This is your only chance at money like this.”

Dex wanted to leave right then on principle. First, he wasn’t the first member of the family to go to college—his grandfather had played football at UMaine for a year, and his cousin Lucy had graduated a full two years ago—and second, Scarborough was the tenth-biggest place in Maine. But the fact remained that he was poor, his family was poor, and $1.3 million was a fuckton of cash.

He spun around. “I need to think about it,” he said quickly. “I’m not rushing into anything. And I want to read the contract.” Find an agent. Talk to actual players. Tell his parents.

Koenig smiled again. “Absolutely. We’ll be in touch. I’ll get your email from Travis.”

With that, Dex half-fled the office.

“Was that Roy Koenig?” Nursey asked. Dex blinked, not wholly processing that his roommate was awake, standing in front of him, and holding two cups of coffee, one of which looked eerily like Dex’s usual order.

“Yeah,” Dex said awkwardly. Why did Nursey even know what Roy Koenig looked like?

“What did he want?”

Dex couldn’t bring himself to answer, and it felt like a rhetorical question anyway. Why else would a GM meet with a college hockey player? They stood in silence for a long moment.

“Right,” Nursey said. “Well, congrats.” He stood there for a moment longer, fiddling with what he would call a shitty waste of good black coffee. Jerkily, he handed it to Dex, then sped off.

Nursey wasn’t running, exactly, but he was walking at the clip which other SMH members called his “New Yorker I’m walkin’ here!” pace. Since Nursey had once clocked a 7-minute mile using this pace, and since Dex had a bum knee, there was basically no hope of catching him.

Fuck.

Dex needed a plan. Once he had a plan, everything else could be dealt with.

Step one: find his backpack. He walked into the rink itself, finding it half-wedged underneath a bleacher seat. A cursory inspection confirmed that no one had stolen his computer or the emergency $20 he’d shoved into the lining. Dex sat down, took a drink of his latte—which was exactly how he liked it, because of course it was—and planned his next move.

He needed to talk to someone in the NHL, someone that played the hidden game. Since Bitty was basically his only point of contact for NHL players, this meant Alexei Mashkov. Or Putowski, but more than likely Mashkov.

Therefore, step two was texting Bitty and asking for Mashkov’s number. This having been accomplished, it was time for step three: return home and somehow fix whatever had gone wrong with him and Nursey.

The good news was that Nursey was probably back at the Haus, because Bitty had promised pancakes in about half an hour. The bad news was that this meant feelings talk, which Dex considered to be the sixth circle of Hell (before public speaking, third-degree sunburns, and sharing a room with your unrequited crush of about a year and a half, but after most apocalyptic scenarios).

Dex swung his backpack onto his shoulder and headed back to the Haus. He’d have rehearsed what he wanted to say to Nursey on the walk back, but he had no idea what the hell was going through Nurse’s head right now. Instead, he tried to codify everything he needed to ask Mashkov.

The second he walked into the Haus, he was greeted with “Dex, come help me with theses pancakes!”

When he walked into the kitchen, he realized just how much of an excuse that was. Bitty had two full platters of pancakes on the counter, what smelled like bacon in the oven, and eggs on the stove. “What can I do?” he asked, trying to sound as sarcastic as he feasibly could without crossing the line into “mean.”

“Why do you need Tater’s number?” Bitty asked.

Dex sighed. He should have expected that Bitty would be overprotective of NHL phone numbers. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said, dropping his voice. He knew for a fact that every wall was almost unsafely thin, and sound carried like a motherfucker. “I got an NHL offer. Only because of the whole spinning blocks thing. I want to talk it out with someone who might understand.”

Bitty, thankfully, could read how unenthused Dex was about the whole process and didn’t bother congratulating him. “I’ll give him your number,” he said finally. “What team?”

Here was the dicey part. “The Aces,” Dex said, even more quietly. He knew how much Bitty and Mashkov both hated the Aces, and especially Kent Parson. And (if he took the job) his job would literally be protecting the Aces, and especially Kent Parson.

“Which way are you leaning?” Bitty asked.

Dex shook his head. “No fucking clue,” he said. “They’re offering a lot of money.”

Bitty nodded. “How long do you get to think about it?”

“A week.”

Bitty nodded. “I know Jack doesn’t play the hidden game, but you should talk to him anyway. He knows a lot more about going from the NCAA to the NHL than anyone else.”

That was a good point, and one Dex hadn’t considered. “Yeah, I will. Thanks, Bitty.”

“Of course,” Bitty said. “Now, set the table. People will start coming soon.”

Nursey was the third person to breakfast, which wasn’t that surprising, considering he lived in the Haus. What was surprising was that, upon seeing Dex, he didn’t immediately turn and leave, like Dex was expecting.

Dex didn’t want to push it. He took a seat about as far from Nursey as he feasibly could, in between Chowder and Tango. This had the added bonus of practically guaranteeing that he wouldn’t have to speak to anyone for the duration of the meal.

His phone buzzed, but he planned on ignoring it until he could be sure to grab four blueberry pancakes and not get stuck with the crappy plain ones. It was a favorite trick of Holster’s to send texts just before food free-for-alls so as to the least number of competitors for chicken nuggets. Then it buzzed again, and again.

Who the hell was calling him? Dex flipped over his phone, didn’t recognize the number. His caller ID said that the number was from Providence, Rhode Island, but after the number of people who had called him about his credit card these past few weeks, he no longer trusted caller ID.

“Hello?”

“Dex?” a Russian voice asked. “Is Mashkov. You call me Tater. B said you wanted to talk.”

When did Bitty even have time to send that text? “Uh, yeah. I’m Dex.” He stood up, mourning the loss of the delicious pancakes he wasn’t going to get to enjoy, and began walking to his bedroom.

“He say Aces recruit you for volshebnaygra?” Mashkov asked. Dex spoke literally no Russian, but he answered in the affirmative, just in case it was Russian for the hidden game. Context clues, and all that. “Congratulations.”

“Not that impressive,” Dex said. “They want me cuz I spin.”

“That rare,” Tater said. “Not many spin in NHL. Still important, of course, but nobody recruit for it.” He paused. “Did not think Aces cared much. Parson only one who spins on their team.”

Right. Dex sort of knew that. It was why Parson had showed up last night—this morning?—for the thing. Probably. The one good thing about watching hockey on TV instead of in person was that it was much harder to watch the hidden game—curses didn’t really register on video unless you were paying really, really close attention—so Dex really wasn’t sure who was playing the hidden game versus who wasn’t.

“But you’ve seen me play,” Dex said. “You know I’m not good enough.”

Tater sighed. Loudly. Dex winced at the static on the phone; he hated that sound. “Traditional hockey? Maybe no. But our hockey, sure.”

It was weirdly comforting to have it broken down like that. “Do you think it’s worth it to do it?” Dex asked. “Or should I just graduate?”

“I dunno. Never went to college. Is thing you should ask yourself.”

Which—seriously? Intellectually, Dex knew he was probably right, but the whole point of asking for advice was so that Dex didn’t have to answer this himself.

Dex asked a few more questions about what it was like to spin in the NHL, things that he probably could have gotten from watching games and paying attention but were good to confirm. The big ones, of course, being “what sort of code of honor exists and do people often break it to throw knee-shattering curses at people just doing their jobs?”

“Da,” Tater said. “Strong code in place, people do not break. Nothing permanent, nothing too damaging. Can start fights, otherwise. I almost killed Parson when he spun at Snowy’s eye.”

“Okay, thanks,” Dex said.

“You have agent yet?” Tater asked.

“Uh, no.”

“I’m send you my agent’s contacts. She very good. Played softball—our softball—at Cal. Give her a call, look over contracts. Important, no matter what you decide.”

Since Dex had no idea how to go about getting an agent, he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Yeah, okay. I’ll give her a call. Thanks,” he said again.

“Good luck. Call if need more advice,” Tater said, before hanging up.

Dex stood in the center of his room for a second. He needed a plan. Plan round two. He went to his desk, grabbed the notebook sitting on it and a pen, and began to make a list of things to accomplish, in no particular order.

-Call agent

That was easy enough. He could handle talking to an agent, couldn’t he? He had beaten good interview skills into himself through sheer force of will. He would call on Monday.

-Fix thing with Nursey

Less easy, since Dex didn’t even really know what was wrong.

-Figure out NHL shit

Harder still. While it was good to know that he wasn’t wholly unqualified, he still had no idea which way he was leaning.

-Tell Mom

This wouldn’t be too bad. Sure, his mom would probably tell the entire family, who would in turn tell the entire town of Scarborough, who in turn would spread it all over Maine, but the actual telling shouldn’t be too bad.

…On second thought, he’d do that one last.

When it was all written down like that, it didn’t look nearly as daunting. Dex took a deep breath, put the notebook back onto his desk, and went back downstairs.

“Who was that?” Chowder asked, passing him a stack of three blueberry pancakes that someone had probably had to defend at knifepoint to keep them away from the rest of the team.

“My mom,” Dex lied instantly. “She wanted to chat.”

He began to eat his pancakes rapidly, just in case Wicks got hungry enough to steal leftovers again. Seriously, before graduation he needed to get Bitty’s pancake recipe, because these were amazing.

When he finished, he looked up and noticed that Nursey was already gone.

This was a common occurrence over the next week. Dex pretty much didn’t see Nursey except for practice and team bonding, and even then, Nursey kept the talking to a minimum. He wouldn’t come back to the room until Dex was already asleep, and he’d be asleep well after Dex left for class.

Somehow, it was easier to decide to play in the NHL and tell his mother than it was to have a conversation with his roommate. That was wrong.

Dex had decided to sign for three reasons: one, $1.3 million was a hell of a lot of money; two, his new agent had pointed out he could transfer his credits to UNLV and still maybe graduate on time; and three, $1.3 million was a hell of a lot of money.

Chelsea, the agent, had worked out a thing where he’d finish the season and the year before everything would start. She’d also done a thing where he would get a (gigantic) bonus if he reduced team injuries by 15%. She was also, incidentally, now one of Dex’s favorite people.

His mom had been somewhat less than pleased, though it had more to do with the idea with him moving cross-country than it was about him playing pro hockey, possibly not graduating on time, and making more money in two years than his parents had made in twenty. His brother just asked if this meant he had to support the Aces. Family loyalty meant nothing these days.

Three items on his list having been accomplished, it was time for drastic measures and what his grandmother would call dirty pool in accomplishing the fourth. At seven PM, Dex went to Annie’s and bought himself a venti vanilla latte with a double pump of caramel and an extra shot, which he drank while beginning work on another algos problem set. At 9:30 or so, he walked back to the house and continued doing his algos homework at the kitchen table until about 10:15, when he feigned tiredness and went upstairs.

There, he waited.

Of course, since it wasn’t really in Dex’s nature to wait, he spent most of the next twenty minutes half-heartedly straightening up the room before he finally heard Nursey half-tripping up the stairs.

…Actually, one of those could have been “actual tripping.” It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time.

Dex didn’t really know where to put his body, so he was standing almost directly opposite the door when Nursey came in. They stared at each other awkwardly for a moment before Nursey said, “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Dex said, “but I think you’ve been avoiding me.”

Nursey sighed and took a seat on his bed. “So you went with the ambush method? You couldn’t have texted?”

“…Shit.” Why hadn’t Dex thought about texting? He loved texting. He got to screen every thought and avoid people: two of his favorite things.

Nursey raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, dude?”

“Why have you been avoiding me?” Dex asked.

“I haven’t been avoiding—”

“Seriously?” Dex asked. “That’s bull, and you know it.”

“Believe what you want,” Nursey said, almost aggressively chill. It was driving Dex crazy.

“I thought we were friends,” Dex said angrily. “Friends don’t just not talk to each other.”

Nursey huffed. “I’m sorry, you want to talk about not talking to each other? You came at me for no fucking reason before we played BC, and when I wanted to talk about that, you said that you didn’t give a shit as long as it wouldn’t, quote, disturb my play. You ran in here like a freaking bat out of hell after your date last week, and all you told me was that it was “bad.” You looked like you’d been attacked. But no, I wouldn’t understand, so we’re not talking about that, either. And while we’re talking about things we’re not talking about, how about the fact that you get the NHL offer when I’m a better player than you are?”

Now Dex was angry. Saying that Nursey was the better hockey player was sort of like saying that Dex was taller. It was technically true, but only by a millimeter, and only if you didn’t count the extra half-inch courtesy of Nursey’s voluminous hair.

“You want to know why they picked me over you? That’s what you’re so fucking butthurt about? Are you shitting me?” he asked. He made a concentrated effort to keep his voice down. He knew firsthand exactly how thin the walls in the Haus were; he’d reinsulated half of them last winter.

“Sure, let’s start there,” Nurse said, clearly not caring about the whole “Bitty and Chowder could probably hear everything they said” thing.

“You want to see why they picked me over you? Fine!” And Dex spun a curse.

It was probably the first curse he’d spun in six years that didn’t take five minutes to get there. But because it had been so long since he’d spun a quick one, he had no idea where he was aiming in the slightest.

He found out when his magic completely shattered their mirror.

“Shit,” Dex said, deflating. He hadn’t pulled something that dumb with his magic since he was probably nine. Hell, he probably hadn’t used his magic for a curse that deadly for about as long. “I—shit. I’m sorry. I’ll get the broom.”

Nursey looked—really freaked, actually. And this from King Chill. He looked at the mirror, then back at Dex a few times. “What the fuck?” he asked, eyes wide. “What the fuck did you do?”

Dex sighed and sank into one of their desk chairs. “You asked why the Aces want me,” he said softly. “Why I was so freaked before we played BC, and why I was such a mess on Friday. That’s why. I’m magic.”

Dex wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Nursey’s eyes got even wider. “Holy shit.”

“It’s—it’s a thing,” Dex said. “There are usually a couple guys on each team that can spin curses, or whatever. I’m pretty crap at that part, but I’m decent at blocking.”

“So…there are other guys on the team that are magic? Just casually?” At Dex’s nod, he asked, “Who are they?”

“Just me and Bitty right now. Shitty was one. Johnson, the old goalie before us, was one. Ransom might be magic, but if he is, he’s got no clue. We weren’t really gonna tell him. Uh…Murray played the hidden game at ND, but, y’know, he’s coaching now. Farmer plays, but for volleyball—”

Nursey blinked. “The what game?”

Dex explained as simply as he could, which then segued into the whole BC-Novak thing, which then segued into the “what happened on Friday” thing. It was probably the most honest he’d been with Nursey, and Dex hated it. It wasn’t quite feelings talk, but it still was uncomfortably close to it.

“Can I ask one more question?” Nursey asked. Dex shrugged. He’d already asked about twenty of them, and Dex didn’t really believe he was ever going to stop. “Why don’t you guys just tell people that you’re magic?”

“Because telling people you’re magic is a one-way ticket to the psych ward?” Dex asked. “Besides, it’s really not much of a thing. It’s not like we’re working alchemy or anything.”

“Okay, last question,” Nursey said, and Dex stifled a groan. What else could he possibly have to ask? Magic wasn’t really a hard concept to grasp.

“Is this why you didn’t want to room with me?”

Oh, god. Not this. They had successfully ignored this for months. “Not really,” Dex said. “Most of my family doesn’t have magic, either. I’m used to hiding it.” He glanced over at Nursey, who had gone from excited to depressed in a heartbeat. Shit. This was the opposite of what he intended to do. He took a deep breath and, absolutely hating himself, continued. “And I’m not going to apologize for not wanting to live with the guy I’ve had a crush on for a year and a half.”

And then Dex got the hell out of Dodge.

Dex knew two things—one, Bitty was in Rhode Island for the weekend, and two, that a simple door wouldn’t stop Derek Nurse when he wanted to talk. So, while he fully intended to camp in Bitty’s room for the night, he needed to get out of the house for a little bit first. Thank God he’d left his coat and boots downstairs.

He walked all the way around the Pond, wasting a full hour. He was so tired. Fuck it, even if Nurse was camped outside Bitty’s room waiting for him, it wasn’t worth it to stay out any longer. He turned back home, pulling his coat tighter around him. It was too cold for this shit.

This shit, of course, being that talking with Nurse dredged up a whole crapload of things Dex just didn’t want to talk about but now couldn’t get out of his head. His crush on Nursey headed the list, but the whole Novak situation was right under it. Dex had been very distracted this week and hadn’t had time to think about that, but now he couldn’t get it out of his head. Dex didn’t tend to get obsessive too often, but he just couldn’t stop seeing Novak’s shade sobbing on center ice. Dex sighed. He needed to go to bed. Go to bed, and possibly construct a plan so he never had to see his roommate again.

He was almost home when the hand snaked out from a comically-oversized hedge and pulled him into someone’s backyard.

“If you scream, I’ll kill you,” the grabber said. He brandished a knife in Dex’s face.

Seriously? Was this some sort of sick laxbro prank? “Look, I don’t want any trouble—”

“Then why’d you take my fucking magic?”

Oh. Oh, shit. This was Ryan Novak, then, and he was exactly as batshit crazy as previously thought. Fuck. “I didn’t do anything, Ryan,” Dex said in (what he hoped was) a consoling sort of tone. “I was—”

“I saw you there!” Novak hissed. He still hadn’t let go of Dex’s wrist. “Don’t lie to me.”

Dex was suitably freaked out at this point. He had no desire to end up on one of those bizarre true crime shows—or worse, podcasts—because this guy took a hockey rivalry too far. “I was just watching, I didn’t spin anything,” he said, hoping that he didn’t sound as scared as he thought he did.

“I don’t care what you claim you did or didn’t do,” Novak snarled. “Fucking fix me, or I swear to god, I’ll rip you to shreds. Hard to play in the NHL when you’re fucking dead!”

Well. Dex hadn’t realized how much that particular story had spread. Shit. “Fix you?” Dex asked. Please say that it wasn’t what he thought it was, please say it wasn’t what they thought it was…

“Give me back my magic,” Novak said, “or I’ll kill you.”

Fucking fuck shit. “It was a total negation, Ryan. Irreversible.”

“Bullshit!” Dex flinched, and he hated himself. “There are stories…it’s possible. You could do it.”

“Um. No, I can’t.”

Ryan Novak shook his head. “You never got it, did you? They said you hadn’t. I thought it was BS.”

Who the hell was this “they”? Dex was annoyed enough that he was almost starting to forget about the sheer terror of the situation. He really, really wasn’t anything special. “I’m not better at this shit than anyone else,” he said. “I don’t spin curses or negate shit. All I do are blocks.” He paused. “And I can’t reverse your permanent negation, even if I wanted to.”

The knife slashed, ripping through Dex’s coat and sending down flying everywhere. “What the fuck? This jacket cost me $82!” Dex half-shouted. It was L.L. Bean, bought on sale but not thrifted, and probably the most expensive single piece of clothing he’d ever owned. Hell, ever hoped to own. He itched to punch the guy, but the whole knife thing made him hold back

“Next time, it’ll be your face,” Ryan Novak said, clearly distracted. He held Dex’s arm in a vise grip and cut again, this time making a thin, bloody line down Dex’s forearm. “You’re full of magic, you know that? Luck of the draw, I guess. Shit like that happens. They say Merlin was just a guy, too.” He smeared Dex’s blood on his hands and then on his cheekbones, like the world’s most metal baseball player. Dex felt sick just looking at it. Novak sliced his own hand, repeated the blood smearing, then stabbed the bloody knife into the ground. Then he began chanting, and Dex could begin to feel the magic—his magic?—building up around them.

Oh. Oh, fuck.

Dex recognized this fucking set-up. More importantly, he recognized what was going to happen when (and he was positive it was a when) this shit went sideways. The absolute last thing he wanted was an explosion with him at the center in some rando’s backyard. That meant it was time for the most Hail Mary of Hail Marys.

Dex dipped his thumb into the blood still dripping down his arm and swiped it over his neck, making what he hoped was a crescent shape before going back over the shape with a V. The crescent and V-rod was the easiest possible shape he could make that still had enough significance for the ward to take, and Dex sure as shit didn’t want to try freehanding the Pictish beast with his thumb and no mirror. He was chanting as well, alternating between “Dìon mi bho naimhdean” and “ora pro nobis,” figuring that it couldn’t hurt to cover his bases. He had no clue if this counted as a negation or a ward, but he figured that guessing wrong would be very, very bad.

After a second of deliberation, Dex repeated the same symbol on Novak’s hand. Better safe than sorry, and no matter how much knife-waving and curse-spinning Novak had done, no one deserved to be literally blown up.

Or, at least, whatever Dex was doing might contain the implosion.

Novak was too far gone to notice what Dex was doing, which was probably a good thing. Dex, meanwhile, was trying to push every iota of his magic into containing and/or negating Novak’s shit. His own shit? He had no idea.

After what felt like an hour, but was probably about a minute and a half, the magic that Novak was working with exploded with a dull boom that thundered in Dex’s bones. He fell backward, or maybe he was pushed.

Novak hit the ground as well, face-first into a snowbank. Oh god. Was he dead? Dex took a deep breath and inched forward, wincing at the movement. He hadn’t felt this out of it since freshman year Spring C, when he did nine shots of tequila and woke up the next morning wearing Lardo’s short shorts, Shitty’s flower crown, and not much else.

Years of lifeguard training indicated that Ryan Novak wasn’t dead, and the last of Dex’s energy ensured that the guy wouldn’t be breathing snow in the near future.

It was so cold out here. Why couldn’t he have just lied and said the whole magic thing was the problem with living with Nursey? He’d done it to Bitty last year, and believably, too.

“I’m telling you, I heard something mad freaky in our yard, Ty.”

Dex turned quickly toward the sound, then winced at the quick change of scenery. Could magic make you hungover, or was he just insanely tired?

“Brandon, I’m telling you, I didn’t hear shit.”

Oh god. Of course this was the football house. It wasn’t enough that Dex had to stop an imminent explosion and a batshit crazy sociopath, he also had to deal with people that absolutely hated him. Everything sucked.

“Come and check it out with me anyway!”

“I don’t see shit, either.”

“Of course you don’t, dumbass. It’s nighttime. I think it was from that corner,” Brandon Knowles said, pointing in the completely wrong direction. Dex sighed. He should speak up or otherwise indicate his presence, but that seemed out of his abilities now.

“And why did I have to come when I was very clearly writing a paper due at 8 tomorrow?” Tyler Jacobs asked.

“Because I didn’t hear-hear it. I, you know, magic-heard it.”

Tyler Jacobs pulled out his phone, activated the flashlight, and swung it at the corner Brandon had pointed out. “Yeah, I don’t see anything.” He swung it across the yard, managing to shine the light directly in Dex’s eyes.

“Holy shit!” Brandon whisper-yelled. Tyler flinched so hard, he almost dropped the phone.

“What is he doing here?” Tyler hissed. “Why is he in our yard?”

“Go talk to him!”

“You go talk to him! This was your dumbass idea!”

“Fine, we’ll both go,” Brandon said. “Come on.”

Both of them approached Dex with looks of resignation and caution. “Um…” Brandon Knowles said. “Why are you in our yard?”

Dex jerked his head at Novak’s unconscious body. “Fucker attacked me,” he said shortly. Feeling like he should elaborate, he added, “Stabbed my coat.” He flopped the arm in question.

“Are you okay?” Brandon asked after a moment.

Dex considered the question. “No,” he decided. “Not really.”

Brandon blinked. “Uh, cool.” He turned to Tyler. “Hey, can you take that guy in? I’ll help Poindexter.”

“Uh-uh, dude.”

“It’s freezing outside!” Brandon said. “We can’t leave him out here!”

“Why not?”

“He’ll die?”

Tyler sighed. “Fine. But where the hell are we supposed to put them?”

Brandon clearly hadn’t thought of that. “Uh…we can put them in your room. It’s on the first floor, and we wouldn’t have to go through the main room.”

“I have an essay, dipshit.”

“And you can take my room, Jesus.” Brandon said. “I’ll hit up Micah and spend the night there.”

“Fine.” And then Dex was being hauled to his feet and guided to the football players’ house before being deposited on a surprisingly small bed, considering the size of Tyler Jacobs. Novak was, Dex was secretly pleased to note, was dumped unceremoniously in a pile by the door.

Dex didn’t bother to get under the blankets. He just went straight to sleep.

At 3 AM, he was woken up by the sound of crying. Not loud crying, necessarily, but Dex had babysat enough small children to recognize the sound even in a dead sleep.

Ryan Novak was weeping on the floor.

Before he realized what he was doing, Dex started talking. “I didn’t want to do it. Sounds like a fucking copout, I know. What they did—we did. What we did was shitty, and it was unfair, and I don’t blame you if you hate us forever.

“But what you did was shitty, too. You were spinning some dangerous shit out there, and I don’t blame them for doing it if it means that someone doesn’t end up dead. Because Nurse could have died, I saw what you spun. And—”

“Don’t,” Ryan Novak whispered. “Don’t you fucking dare try to make me feel better about this.”

“Fuck that shit,” Dex said. “You should feel shitty. It’s like a lobotomy or some shit. But don’t you fucking dare pretend like you’re the victim here.”

“Then who is?”

Fuck if Dex knew. “There fucking isn’t one,” he said finally. “We’re all guilty.” He paused again. “Go back to sleep, I have class tomorrow.”

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

When Dex woke up again, Novak was gone. It was 7—very late for him, but understandable given the events of last night, but plenty of time to go back to the Haus, get ready for the day, and make it to class on time.

He had a few messages, mostly from Nursey. The last one, at 3 AM, read: Are you okay? I’m getting worried. Dex texted back, Sorry. Shit happened. I’ll explain in person. Then he got out of bed and hurried back to the Haus.

Nursey was asleep when Dex got back, and Dex didn’t bother to wake him up. Instead, he got in the shower and thought. He knew that he shouldn’t continue to ignore his roommate, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually continue their discussion.

Thankfully, he still wasn’t awake when Dex got out of the shower, got changed, grabbed his backpack, and headed to class.

He would address this—this shit after class. That was a promise. But he still intended on graduating, an he still needed this class to do it

The text came halfway through class—not that Dex was checking. It just popped up on his desktop. I’m free til noon.

Dex hadn’t been raised to be rude, so he responded immediately. I’m out at 10:30. Annie’s?

Sure.

Whether or not Dex absorbed literally any other information in class after that was his own fucking business.

He beat Nursey to Annie’s, only partially because Nursey was physically incapable of getting anywhere on time. Dex didn’t precisely book it to the coffee shop, which would be absurd, since he had no desire to have this conversation in the first place, but he didn’t exactly take his time, either.

Dex was a mess, and he was going to blame last night because he could.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Nursey said about five minutes later.

“It’s fine,” Dex said. “So, um, about last night—I meant to come back to the Haus, but I had a sort of a run-in with Ryan Novak, and anyway, long story short I ended up passing out at the football house.”

“Are you okay?” Nursey asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Dex said.

“Good,” Nursey said. “Because I have some things to say about last night, too. First off, you can’t ambush me into a conversation like that. It was mad uncool, and it was hella unfair to put me on the spot like that.”

“You’re right,” Dex said. This was better than he feared. At least he hadn’t brought up Dex’s proclamation yet.

“Second, you don’t get to storm off when we hit a topic of discussion that you don’t like. Communication needs to be a priority, and it needs to go both ways. We stick conversations out to the end, okay?”

“Okay.” Rules. Rules were good. A lot better than some dumb “truce.” Dex could deal with rules.

“Third, you don’t take your anger out on me when it’s not my fault. I’m not your punching bag, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’m not saying you have to tell me everything, but you should feel comfortable enough to tell me that something is wrong without lying to me.”

“Okay.”

Nursey took a deep breath and looked him directly in the eyes. “That said—do you want to go out with me tomorrow?”

“What?” Dex asked. “You—you want to go out with me? Like, on a date?”

Nursey nodded. “Unless you were just kidding with the whole crush thing? Because I’ve kind of had a thing for you too, and I think it’s worth seeing where it goes.”

Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. “Yeah,” Dex finally said. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

Nursey did that weird half-smile thing that he did sometimes. “Yeah, me too.”

Chapter Text

Dex’s magic, explained more fully:

There are two facts that remain constant in Dex’s life—one, he has a shit-ton of magic, and two, he is crashingly bad at spinning curses. Like, “taking five minutes to spin what most people can spin in about fifteen seconds” bad. His mind just doesn’t work that way. He has no idea what a normal amount of magic is or feels like; he has no idea how much magic he has in relation to other people. He has the magic he has, and, because he has no other real frame of reference, he assumes that’s normal. Will he ever get better at spinning curses? He could, if he put in significant time and effort and found his ass a spin-tutor, but he won’t, because he sees absolutely no need for that shit.

Why the football team “hates” (is terrified of) him:

Dex has no idea how much magic he has in relation to normal, but the football team sure as shit does. And it freaks. them. out. How would you feel if this kid casually walked around campus with the functional equivalent of a small nuke strapped to his back? Of course, Dex is oblivious, so he just assumes that they hate him.

Will Brandon Knowles ever ask Dex out:

No. Brandon Knowles is a coward.

How Dex and Bitty watched the video of Novak spinning when magic doesn’t show up well on tape:

Two reasons: first, they were paying close attention to the magic. Dex usually doesn’t bother when watching hockey games on TV. It kind of gives him a headache.

Second, that curse was enormous and angry. It’s the difference between missing a cherry bomb going off and missing a pound of C4 going off.

The They in “They said you hadn’t got it”:

The hockey teams talk. Everyone’s got that one friend of a friend who plays at [blank] and they talk a lot. Especially the guys playing the hidden game. Especially about that one ginger kid on the team who can take whatever the fuck you throw at him like it didn’t even land. And when Kyle McCray finds out that Dex has no fucking clue that he’s got pretty much all the magic? That’s some hot gossip. That shit makes it all the way to the West Coast.

Why they call him Deadpool:

I thought it was funny. (More specifically, he takes a lot of damage and is completely unfazed by it. It’s a nickname, not a specific classification.)

If Dex is Deadpool, does Bitty have a fun nickname:

Not unless you count “the NHL’s illicit jam dealer.” Bitty is, if not average at magic, at least within the status quo of things you can expect while playing the hidden game.

What the hell Novak was doing, and why it worked when he had no magic:

Novak was trying to do a reverse-negation. While technically possible (at least in myth; look at Percival/Galahad and the Fisher King), it was a bad, poorly-thought-out idea. He was not trying to steal Dex’s magic, though he wouldn’t have been opposed to that outcome. He needed the magic to break through and overwhelm the total negation.

As for why it worked, it worked because blood has magic. Dex’s blood has a lot of magic. Novak was using the magic in that blood to try and overwhelm the negation and get his magic back.

Of course, shit went sideways and the magic he was using literally blew up in his face, so that’s fun.

Is Dex (and his magic) okay after what happened:

Yes. Pretty much for the first time ever, Dex actually hit the bottom of his reserves. That, plus the magical implosion (thanks, Ryan) left him basically feeling the magical version of a hangover. He’ll be fine. He just needs a good night’s rest and some PediaLyte.

Does Novak leave Dex alone after this:

Yes.

Is Dex powerful because Pictish magic is particularly strong:

Nope. None of the rituals really matter, except that they matter to you. It’s all about how much magic you put into it. (Incidentally, this is also why ora pro nobis works so well for Dex, even though it just means “pray for us.” Dex is a lapsed Catholic.)

How Dex came out to his family:

Dex, age twelve: Today, we learned about people that are gay and lesbian.

Dex’s mom: Uh-huh.

Dex: Is there a word for people who sometimes like guys the way they like girls?

Dex’s mom: Yeah, it’s called bisexual.

Dex: Cool.

Dex’s mom: Are you bisexual?

Dex: Sometimes.

Dex’s mom: Cool.

An argument Nursey and Dex have 1000% had:

Nursey: -says something about Maine being backwards and antigay and Republican as fuck-

Dex: …where the fuck do you think I’m from?

Nursey: …you’re from Maine.

Dex: Yeah, I know that. My question is, do you? Because we're fully in New England, we were the second state to legalize gay marriage by popular vote, and our residents don’t really give a shit about abortion.

What other aspects of life besides sports and baking are affected by magic:

All of them. Anywhere where a slight edge is important. Presentations, lotteries, job interviews, lane changes, trials (why do you think Shitty went back to cursing his hair dark?), etc.

Fun (and wholly true) fact: Ireland has the world’s highest concentration of redheads, at about 10%. The highest concentration, that is, except for the US presidency, where the concentration is about 16% (7/44). Make of that what you will.

What Jack and Bob Zimmermann know and/or would think about magic:

Not a damn thing. It would probably be a weird adjustment period, knowing that curses were flying places they shouldn’t, but it wouldn’t affect their own game. If Jack found out that Bitty was magic, he’d probably be a little bit confused and maybe slightly concerned, but it wouldn’t affect anything in the long term. Except that now warding up before hockey games is a form of foreplay for them.

What are those cookies Bitty made in Chapter 3:

https://therecipecritic.com/brown-butter-salted-caramel-snickerdoodles/

Does Dex sign with the Aces:

Yes. Dex is all about the money, money, money.

What Nursey and Dex's date was like:

Both will agree that it was the worst date of their lives. Dex is nervous enough he can't string more than four words together (six, if he's talking to the waitress), and Nursey is nervous enough that he is babbling about literally everything that pops into his head. And then to make matters worse, they both have to go back to their room because (and neither of them thought this through) they're still living with their awkward-ass date. But then they get to second while watching Miracle with the team the next night, so things get back on track. Date #2 is (at least marginally) more successful.

Will there be a sequel:

Like. Maybe.

I’m busy as shit and bad at finishing things, so I’m not gonna promise anything. But also, this is a fun sandbox to play in. So we’ll see.

If I did, it would pick up right around when Dex moves to Las Vegas and be called The Enforcer.