Chapter Text
Three days before the rest of the team comes back for pre-season, Shitty moves into the Haus.
His mom drives down with him to help move boxes up the stairs, but she doesn’t stay long. Shitty is just hugging her goodbye when a familiar black truck pulls up in front of the Haus. He’d like to say that he doesn’t tear himself out of his mother’s arms to throw himself at Jack, but, well. He kind of does.
Jack staggers backward with an “Oof,” clearly out of practice with his ability to catch Shitty no matter the circumstances.
“Hello, my beautiful polar bear prince.”
Jack shoves at him and laughs. “Hi, Shits.”
It’s not like he hadn’t seen Jack all summer – they’d spent a few memorable weeks with Alicia and Bob in Montreal and Jack had come to Cambridge for a little while, but Shitty’s newly realized codependency has apparently decided to rear its ugly head.
Jack hugs Shitty’s mom hello and Shitty ducks down to kiss her cheek before she drives away, promising she’ll try to make it to a couple of home games this year, and Shitty watches until her car turns the corner before leaping at Jack again.
They get Jack’s stuff up to his room with minimal huffing and puffing, because of course Jack has been training all summer long. Shitty… hasn’t, but then again, Shitty isn’t going to be first line anytime soon. As soon as Jack sets the final box down on the floor, Shitty collapses onto his bed in a sweaty heap.
“Eugh. Shitty. You’re gonna make my bed sweaty.”
Shitty winks up at him. “I’ve gotta break these sheets in somehow, baby.”
Jack turns a very interesting shade of pink and tears open one of his boxes with vigor. Shitty, still worn out from carrying everything up the stairs, just props himself up on one elbow and watches as Jack begins to unpack.
The first thing he pulls out of the box is that goddamned “Be Better” poster, because of fucking course it is. Shitty glares at it once Jack has it unfurled, and just shakes his head when Jack looks over at him.
“I hate that fucking thing.”
Jack’s lips thin as he presses them together. “It’s… motivational.”
“It’s bullshit, is what it is.” Shitty says.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to push yourself, Shitty.”
Rather than fight him over it, Shitty just watches as he carefully sets the poster on his desk and turns back to the box. He stays splayed out on Jack’s bed, refusing to help him unpack in any way beyond encouraging words and a few wolf-whistles when Jack squats down to pick up a box.
The other guys arrive eventually, Johnson hauling his stuff into his new room across the hall and Eggy and Flappy disappearing into the attic. They all poke their heads into Jack’s room to say their hellos, but for the most part leave the two of them alone. Eventually, most of Jack’s stuff is out of boxes and lying around the room, Jack looking around at all of it a little wearily, and Shitty grabs him by the arm and hauls him down the street to Faber.
Jack, who has and maybe always will be more comfortable on the ice than solid ground, beelines immediately for the equipment room to try and dig out some pucks from somewhere, while Shitty goes to dump their gear in the locker room. When Jack hasn’t appeared after a few minutes, Shitty makes his way towards the gear room to chirp him for getting lost and stops dead in his tracks.
“Holy shit.” The equipment room is a mess. Cones are everywhere, extra jocks flung randomly around shelves, and pucks are strewn about the floor. There’s a spare goal lying on its side in the back of the room, netting tangled up in a mix of cones and two helmets and a stray skate blade.
Jack emerges from the depths of the room with an empty bucket in hand and an almost comical look of dismay on his face. “This is ridiculous.”
“This is the entrance to hockey hell, is what this is.” Shitty shudders, “You shouldn’t be here, Zimmermann, the hockey demons won’t know what to do with you.”
With a grimace, Jack scoops up a couple of pucks and drops them in the bucket with a clatter. “No wonder we can’t find a new manager.”
That’s news to Shitty. “I thought Mikey had that figured out before he left?”
“He thought the younger brother of one of his friends would do it, but the kid ended up taking a gap year and the other two candidates both had something come up after their tour and interview with Hall.” He frowns at the unholy mess behind him. “Now I guess I know why.”
They stand there in intimidated silence for another moment before Shitty says, “Well. If they get scared away by a closet, they’ve got no chance trying to order us around.”
“I guess.” Jack frowns. He scoops up a couple more pucks and turns to Shitty. “Please don’t tell the guys we still don’t have a manager.”
“I won’t.” Shitty adds a couple pucks in the bucket. “Need help finding someone?”
“At this point, anyone who you think could hack it I would take.”
“I’ll ask around, brah. Got your back.”
He and Jack spend an hour just messing around on the ice, until Jack tries to actually get some physical exercise and Shitty resists by collapsing at center ice and refusing to move.
“Just skate right over me. Slice me in half. I’m not ready for practice, Jacko, I’m going to die .”
Jack stops short with a spray of snow directed straight at Shitty’s face and cackles as Shitty curses him out. “You should’ve been lifting, Shitty, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not gonna take it easy on you just because you whine at me.”
“Okay, captain. ” Shitty grouches, saluting him with a single finger.
Jack gathers the pucks they’d picked up from the equipment room and starts hitting them gently at Shitty until he hauls himself to his feet. Jack puts the pucks away and goes to talk to the coaches while Shitty takes a long, hot shower and changes, and the two of them head back to the Haus once they’re done.
Jack slips into their shared bathroom when they get back, and Shitty collapses onto Jack’s bed in lieu of returning to his own room. Jack emerges from the shower and glares at Shitty, who shrugs unapologetically and waggles his eyebrows at his friend, who just rolls his eyes with a sigh.
“Hey,” starts Shitty as Jack gets dressed, “wanna come smoke with me? I think I can get the window next to my room open enough that we could go out on the roof.”
Jack, to his credit, actually looks like he’s considering it before he shakes his head. “We start pre-season soon.”
“But we had so much fun – ”
“Not tonight, Shits.”
“… wanna help me break open my window?”
“You’re gonna fall off the roof.”
Shitty scoffs. “Please, Zimmermann. I play a sport with knives strapped to my feet, I can manage.”
“The roof could break. I have less faith in the structural integrity of this house than I do in your balance, Shitty.”
“Structural integrity my ass ,” Shitty mutters, sullenly picking at a corner of Jack’s duvet. “Why are you being allergic to fun right now?”
Expecting Jack to grumble about the responsibilities of collegiate athletics, Shitty’s surprised when Jack says, “I can’t afford to just have fun right now, Shitty,” voice hard and angry.
“Whoa, brah,” Shitty sits up on the bed, eyes fixed on Jack, “what the fuck is happening right now? Did someone body swap you when you were in the bathroom?”
Jack, whose back is turned towards Shitty as he hunches over his dresser, visibly clenches. His voice is controlled when he speaks, even though it’s to say “I think maybe you should go back to your own room.”
It would be enough of a deterrent for literally anybody else, but Shitty just frowns at Jack’s very sculpted back muscles. “No.”
“Shitty – ”
“No, Jack, because you sound like you’re two minutes away from punching something, and I would like to know why, because we have had a very fucking nice afternoon. Which was fun , and therefore you are wrong. ”
When Jack refuses to move from where he’s standing at his dresser, Shitty gets up and moves towards him. When the hand he puts on Jack’s shoulder isn’t violently shoved off, he pulls Jack over to his bed.
Jack sits, but he still won’t make eye contact, and Shitty throws himself on the bed to at least jostle him a little. It doesn’t work, because Jack Zimmermann is built like a fucking Greek god, so he barely even moves. Eventually, though, he sighs and puts his face in his hands.
Shitty leans his head on Jack’s thigh. His massive thigh. Why the fuck did Shitty not work out over the summer. “Are you ready to talk to me now?”
“It’s just that.” Jack releases a very Controlled Breath. “I’m captain. I have to be captain now. I can’t just play around, I have to start thinking about plays, about lines, about what the hell I’m going to do without a manager, and I just.” He shrugs helplessly and lifts his head from his hands, bleak stare fixed on the opposite wall.
“This summer was great, and it was fun, but season starts in three days and everyone is going to be talking about how my captaincy affects the team, and how well we do is a reflection of how I’m doing, and I can’t stop thinking that I’m just gonna… fail.”
Shitty pats his pillow-thigh comfortingly. “First of all, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re going to fail. The boys have heads and egos too big to let you think that you’re the singular fucking player on this team.”
“It’s not really the team I’m worried about, Shits.” Jack says quietly.
Mentally slapping himself for forgetting that Jack has the weight of the entire hockey community on his shoulders, Shitty purses his lips. “Your dad? Or…”
“Or.” Sighs Jack. “Or the NHL scouts that think they dodged a bullet after the overdose. Or the people who’ve been saying I should never have come to college. Or the commentators that still talk about my ruined NHL career. I don’t want to drag Samwell down with me.”
“Jack.” Shitty sits up to look at him, grabbing Jack’s face in his hands to turn his head towards Shitty. “I realize that you get undeserved shit from the media on a level that the rest of us could never possibly hope to understand, but I need you to know that the hockey that you play is and always will be fucking gorgeous, even if you fuck up once or twice. People are always gonna talk shit, and that sucks balls, but the people who really matter are gonna know that you are the captain of this team because you’re the best player on it, and that you’re doing your best to lead a bunch of batshit college kids playing a damn college sport . Which is never going to be the same level as professional fucking hockey.”
“I also recognize that you feel like you’re personally responsible for the reputation of Samwell Men’s Hockey.” Shitty adds after a pause, because he needs Jack to know that he was very serious about that first part and slightly less serious about this. “And I am here to tell you that that is utter bullshit, and I will not stand for it any longer.”
Jack rolls his eyes and opens his mouth, but Shitty reaches up to clap a hand over it. “No, shush. Unfortunately for you and your delicate fucking sensibilities, there is nothing you can do to salvage the on-campus reputation of SMH. There’s probably nothing you should do, because once you leave this team is still going to be the rowdy, irritating mess that it is now. We are heathens, Jack Zimmermann, and you are stuck with all of us.”
Jack swats his hand away, but he’s more relaxed now. His thigh is (just barely) softer under Shitty’s head.
“Also, as long as we can play somewhat cohesive hockey, the off-campus reputation of SMH doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does. Alright?”
“Alright.” Jack says slowly. “Can you remind me of that in two weeks when all I’m doing is yelling at people?”
Shitty grins. “Gladly.”
The next three days fly by as the rest of the team trickles back to campus. Jack has meetings with the coaches almost every day, still hasn’t figured out the manager situation, and is so constantly on-edge that Shitty refuses to talk to him about hockey, resulting in Jack barely talking to him at all.
Instead, he spends his time bonding with Flappy and Eggy, cracks the window frame in his bedroom trying to pry the screen open, and getting very, very high out on the roof.
By the time their first practice rolls around, Shitty misses Jack. He arrives at Faber, intending to hug him into softness, and is instead faced with a stoic, robotic version of Jack Zimmermann he hasn’t seen since the very beginning of last year.
It’s worrying.
Hall and Murray make their customary speeches and ask for introductions, and Shitty watches the handful of new frogs and their feigned confidence with glee. He already loves them. They’re barely even younger than he is – one of them, Adam Birkholtz, is a year older after spending a year in Juniors – but they’re going to be Shitty’s minions. All of them.
Well, some of them. The ones that aren’t already annoying and/or casting sideways glances at Jack like just looking at him is going to make a pile of cocaine magically appear in front of them.
Alright. Maybe not most of them. Maybe just Birkholtz. And the one with the cheekbones in the stall next to him. Something Oluransi.
He’s so busy almost-glaring at the frogs that he doesn’t realize it’s his turn to introduce himself, until frog-Oluransi nudges him tentatively with his foot. “Oh, fuck. I’m Shitty. ‘m from Cambridge. Sophomore. Winger. All that good shit.”
Murray frowns at him but Hall just snorts and waves the intros along, Jack going last from his position up front next to the coaches. He makes a stilted speech about how excited he is to work with this year’s group, belied by the lack of intonation in his voice and the way his stony expression doesn’t change even a tiny bit. By the time it’s over and Hall reads out the lineups for their first couple of drills, Shitty wants nothing more to be out on the ice.
It’s… not so bad, all things considered. Jack mostly watches from the sides and calls out changes, making small comments to the coaches here and there. He joins in on some drills and just watches others, and Shitty is too busy worrying about how fucking out of shape he is to pay too much attention to anything else.
One thing he does notice, though, is the way two of the new frog defensemen haven’t dropped a single pass. It’s Birkholtz and Oluransi with the Cheekbones, who are eyeing each other with something approaching awe once Hall calls the drill dead.
Even Jack is surprised, judging by the angle of his eyebrows and the relaxed set of his shoulders as he joins them. The rest of the boys are appropriately quiet, seeing as two frogs are somehow outperforming the entire top line.
Jack doesn’t say anything, just claps them both on the shoulder and nods approvingly before Hall explains the next drill. Out of the corner of his eye, though, Shitty notices the frogs exchange a quiet, ecstatic grin and fist bump.
After practice, Shitty throws his arms around the shoulders of his two new favorite frogs. He has to tiptoe to do it, too. They’re fucking giants. “Hello, boys.”
“’Sup. Shitty, right?” asks Oluransi.
“Yes, my darling Oluransi,” Shitty sighs, “and my dearest Birkholtz. The new dynamic duo of Samwell Men’s Hockey.”
Birkholtz ducks his head and a delightful pink flush crawls up the back of his neck. “I think we made a pretty good team.”
Oluransi throws a beaming smile his way. God , he’s beautiful, and it’s not just the fucking cheekbones, either. How unfair.
Shitty can appreciate the aesthetic of the male form, okay?
“’Chyeah, bro.” Oluransi reaches across Shitty for a fist bump. “Ransom and Birker, baby.”
Birkholtz grimaces, and when Oluransi – Ransom – furrows his brows at him, he says, “That was the nickname they gave me in Juniors. Didn’t love it, but it stuck.”
Shitty claps him on the back. “Well then, brother, it is our responsibility – nay, our duty – to give you a nickname you love.” The frogs look at him oddly, but they have no choice but to get used to his theatrics, so he continues. “Birkholtz… Birkholtz… Birky?” It sounds too much like Bergy, so he keeps trying. “Birko? Holsy. Holtzy. Holtzer. HOLSTER.” Shitty shouts, stopping in his tracks and slapping the blonde giant next to him.
Ransom grins next to him. “Ransom and Holster.”
“Holster and Ransom.” Birkholtz-turned-Birker-turned-Holster grins back. “Yeah, I like it.”
They’re back at the locker rooms at this point, and everyone is changing out when Jack makes a point of coming over to their corner of the locker room to talk to the two new d-men.
“You two were pretty effective out there today.” Jack says. It’s high praise, and Shitty smiles a little to himself as he pretends to be busy rummaging through his gear bag.
He waits for Jack after practice as he goes to talk to the coaches. It’s tentative, since he and Jack still haven’t really spoken, but it’s also tradition, and so Shitty waits in the hallway. He distracts himself by scrolling through the group chat as the team hashes out the hazing plans for the new frogs and laughing to himself. By the time Jack emerges from the coach’s office, the boys have decided to steal and freeze their underwear during practice. Where they’re going to find a freezer that they’ll be able to burn afterwards remains to be seen, and Shitty has decided to be a neutral party until they can figure that out.
Jack is quiet for a while on their walk back, which strikes Shitty as odd until he remembers his day-long refusal to speak to Jack about hockey.
“Practice went well today, huh?” Shitty says, relenting and elbowing Jack in the side.
A tightness Shitty hadn’t noticed melts away from the corner of Jack’s eyes, and he smiles a little. “I think so, yeah. Those frogs were pretty good.”
“I foresee a little R&H magic in our future, Zimmermann. They’re gonna be swawesome together, I can feel it. ”
“Yeah, okay.” Jack grins. “You hurting yet?”
Shitty winces. His legs are a little tender, enough that he knows he’ll feel it tomorrow. “No.”
Laughing at the blatant lie, Jack kicks at the backs of Shitty’s knees until he wobbles a little. “Sure?”
“Get fucked , Zimmermann.”
“You first.” Jack shoots back, to Shitty’s abject delight.
He screeches with joy and launches himself at his friend, relieved that they’re back to chirping each other. A week back together with Shitty has ensured that Jack is once again accustomed to his antics, and Shitty grins through the pain of a facewash as they grapple together on the sidewalk.
They join the team for lunch, and it’s getting easier and easier to get Jack to join in on conversation now that he’s captain. Ransom and Holster are seated next to each other, already sharing a bowl of fruit and so engrossed in conversation that they fail to notice Asher crawling beneath the table and tying their shoelaces together. Flappy is sitting on Shitty’s right, bitching about his classes for the year and how he’d fucked up his schedule back in his frog year. On Shitty’s other side, Jack is talking strategy with Eggy, because of course he is, and Shitty smiles to himself while he nods and makes sympathetic noises in response to Flappy’s whining.
The dining hall is fairly empty, school still a few weeks out, and the sounds of his team fill the space up quickly. When Flappy gives up on words and starts knocking his head on the table in front of him, Shitty just pats his shoulder and rolls his eyes at Eggy, who looks over at the two of them in fond amusement.
Ransom and Holster choose that moment to stand up for seconds and trip over each other almost immediately. The table erupts in the type of laughter that would get them kicked out of the dining hall during the normal school year, and the frogs sheepishly untangle their shoelaces and help each other up. It’s nice, just sitting and listening to the noise of his loud, stupid hockey family yell at each other, and he realizes with a burst of contentment that he’s really, really looking forward to the year ahead.