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Playoffs ends like a closing act.
Tomorrow the Ranked lobby will be brimming with activity, new hopefuls eager to try their hand at climbing the leaderboards, and returning names for—what feels like—the advent of a new season.
An afternoon in aching visibility. Faces and voices washing in like tidal waves and a lightness in his chest so encompassing he felt airborne. Right now, though, Doog sits grounded in the quiet comfort of company.
He absorbs the moment in fractions. The common room’s homey semicircle of lounges and armchairs. Shifting prism glow from the froglight on the ceiling, casting his surroundings in a staticky dusk. Fragments of conversations drifting to him like snowfall.
There’s Fein’s voice carrying from the other room, arguing his case for whatever he’s deemed the most important issue at this moment and Nerdi’s amused interjections. Inaudible chatter from the five-odd people gathered round a high-burning campfire outside, faces blurred by the glow and voices muted through double-glazed window panes.
A card game on the low table across the floor: Couri keeping up running commentary and Parker laughing and a string of curses from Poundy. With their spread of papers lit by the only lamp, a murmured discussion streams from Fulham and Draconix tucked in the opposite corner.
Doog hears the footsteps before he can twist around to watch Silverr emerge from the kitchen, silhouetted in the amber spilling bright into the common room. His features slip into focus as he steps from the light. Two mugs in his hands. A smile that touches the corners of his eyes.
“I brought drinks,” he offers. Wordlessly, Doog shifts over where he’s perched on the couch with legs drawn up and crossed.
Silverr settles into place by Doog as he presses the mug into his hands, warmed terracotta against his palms.
Doogile squints, swirls its contents. Velvet-dark and a spiced edge to it, curling in the steam. “What is it?”
“They’re experimenting in there.” Silverr nods towards the kitchen, where a faint note of char slips across the threshold. His expression twists. “It should be safe.”
A burst of laughter cuts through the quiet from the open door.
Doog sips at it testingly. It tastes like the taiga encircling their lodging distilled into a cup, pine needles and sweet berry, and something sharp and peppery that creeps in after as a tickle in his throat.
Silverr is watching him consideringly. “Okay?”
“It’s not bad,” Doog says, through a cough.
“I think they used blaze powder.” There’s amusement wavering in his voice. “For the heat.”
Doog wrinkles his nose. “Seriously?”
The light scatters off glitter-specks suspended on the surface when he swirls it again, gleaming the fiery gold that stains his hands and the weave of his clothes. He catches Silverr’s eye, a laugh caught halfway up his chest at the absurdity.
Silverr shrugs like he’s seen worse, takes up his own cup. He slips a finger under his mask to tug it down, and Doog finds himself tracing the crooked curve of his smile, the dip of his cupid’s bow.
He takes a steady drag and sets the drink down. Lets the moment linger.
“I haven’t seen you all day,” Silverr says; leans in with elbows braced against his lap. “Congrats. How’s the second win feel?”
The pride glinting off the warmth of his eyes and brimming in his words slides neatly as a knife between Doog’s ribs. He reaches for his mug again and tips it back. Tastes the earth and the burn of the spice, a rush to his head for the staccato in his chest.
“Good,” he says faintly. “I was going to come find you, but—”
“Interviews and everything, I know.” Silverr waves him off. “Don’t worry. Enjoy it. You deserved that.”
A knee-jerk objection forms at the tip of Doogile’s tongue that he swallows back just as quick. He had felt some jabbing rejection to that thought, but what could capture the spasm of wrong congealed in his throat?
That if he’d deserved that win, so had Silverr, when they’d spent the last week trading games back and forth. Spurred away in casual queues until everything else shifted to background noise, an anticipatory confidence stirring between them like a shared smile. Settling into certainty, almost, that they had it.
That he’d searched the crowds for Silverr as soon as the End’s fog lifted from his vision, dizzy with the thought of radiant elation on his partner’s face and the shivering satisfaction down his spine knowing he’d brought it on.
What comes out is a sigh, wistful the way only something unchangeably passed can be. “I wish I'd played you in finals.”
Then, the way Silverr’s expression shutters: vestiges of the crushed post-quarterfinals defeat he’d allowed, hidden in the silence of a private room.
Doog, the first face Silverr tracked down, was bared the exhausted frustration. Knew he could only follow him into every seed to patch the splitting composure with the demanding rhythm of practice; tell him, stop, slow down, when he knew he had to.
Regret pangs through him, though Silverr’s already smoothed it over with all the professionalism of being under a lens’ scrutiny.
“What, like season one?” He laughs, grin falling just short of reaching his eyes. “Looking for a rematch?”
Two years and seven seasons finds them changed, but they’ve kept pace with each other the whole way. Silverr played through that bracket thinking to meet him at the end. Doog keeps his shrug carefully noncommittal. “Maybe not. It might not go my way.”
“Today?” Silverr blinks twice, rapid succession. Something clears in his expression. “No chance.”
“I think so,” Doog says, resolute.
But Silverr shakes his head. “Not with how you were playing.”
There’s that pride again, ember-hot, and a smile that rises like it’s bleeding from some glowing thing in his thoughts.
Doogile remembers the match as a tunnel-vision blur. Adrenaline and the rush of blood in his ears. But the mistakes glare like steepled sandstone in sunburnt desert: awkward terrain navigation, enough to lose him the first game of finals. Then leaving eyes in the overworld and a missed pearl, snatching the win three blocks down and two seconds off with the luck of a good rotation.
Then Silverr leans close, palms pressed into the couch between them. His fingertips a pinprick startle of fleeting contact, snaring Doog’s attention. The floral air of woodsmoke trails him, bitter on Doog’s tongue as he draws in a stilted breath.
And Silverr says, soft as a confession, “I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
Everything melts away like dissipating steam through his fingers. What remains—what matters—is that breathless feeling when he’d taken the fifth game, dragon’s death rattle scraping in his ears. Like he had been, for a second, on top of the world. He thinks Silverr knows this.
Silverr, as he collapses Doog’s awareness into a living orbital of a space defined by the airless interval between the heat of his attention and Doog’s wide-eyed magnetism.
Doog doesn’t bother to reach for words this time.
It’s clumsily chaste, when he closes that gap; a spur-of-the-moment touch at the corner of Silverr’s mouth that lingers half-unsure, half-unwilling to draw back once he’s there. The tingle of blaze powder spice that spreads over his lips again, char stinging in his nose.
He pulls back and Silverr chases him, the flutter of his eyelids and slight part of his lips like he hasn’t quite processed it. His eyes open in a haze, trails a hand up to the junction of Doog’s neck to sink there firm as an anchor. A flush colours his skin like a sunburn.
“This time,” Doog promises, voice foreign and rough to his own ears. Thinks of their names gilded atop the leaderboard in this phase’s volatile opening weeks. “We’ll get it this season.”
Silverr laughs and tips forwards, forehead falling onto Doog’s shoulder, the bridge of his nose pressed to his collar. He’s cushioned against the hood of Doog’s jumper; reassuring solid weight.
“Sure,” he murmurs. As though he couldn’t care less.
Doog takes in the sight of white-against-white, the spiderweb splay of Silverr’s hair on his hoodie, running together until they’re one spread of colour.
In their lapsing conversation, a piece of someone else’s carries from the other end of the room, raised voice piercing through a blanketed quiet.
The two of them alone in a room of people. He feels a thrill at the thought, a surge of reckless courage: the same preening lurch in his chest as when the commentators would bring up his practice and it was always Doog-and-Silverr, rolling off their tongues. He’s never been one to bask in attention but he’d have them spotlit beneath the world’s curious stares, if it were together.
Or maybe not.
Tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow he will have to step into the scrutiny of daylight. Now they can be curtained in stretching shadow, and he hesitates then rests a hand against Silverr’s spine; the body-heat-warm stitching of his cardigan ridged beneath Doog’s palm. Silverr’s humming that he feels more than hears, some impromptu slow as the rhythm of his breath.
Their friends don’t look over and the world hurtles on, oblivious.