Work Text:
February usually isn’t a great month for Will. The ROAR season is in full swing, and the team is flying to a new city every night, playing back-to-back games and doing training, sponsorships, brand ambassador deals and press conferences between them. They pretty much only get time to sleep on the jet. He’s so busy, he doesn’t really have time to think about anything else. But as the date approaches, it’s like his body just knows. He starts feeling sluggish, exhausted, finds it harder to lift his arms above his head to shoot or receive a pass. Archie sits across from him at the breakfast bar at the hotel and asks him if he’s doing okay with a concerned look on his face. Will quickly perks up and tries to act like his regular, chatty self, praying none of the others will catch on.
The truth is, he doesn’t actually know what’s wrong with him, so he has no choice but to soldier through and hope grit will win out. But then he’s hit with a bout of insomnia, which is stupid because he’s exhausted. Yet no matter what he tries, listening to lofi, counting sheep, deep breathing, he can’t fall asleep. The thrum of the jet drones in his ears as he checks his phone with heavy eyes. Just past one in the morning. And then he sees the date, and his stomach drops.
Two years. It’s been two years since his mom died. He didn’t even remember. What kind of son is he? Of course he knows the date. He always knows what day it is, what time, has to know exactly when he has practice, when to be in the changing room before a game, when their hotel checkout is and when the jet takes off. He has to know who every game is against for the next two weeks, and in what city, so they can adapt to that stadium’s play style. But somehow, this anniversary had slipped his mind.
He looks around. The lights are dimmed, because everyone else, of course, is asleep; Dennis with his weird breathing machine thing going, Lenny with his neck all wrapped up and head on his own shoulder, Jett with her headphones on and head leaning against the window across from him. He wants to talk to someone, but has no idea what to say, and there’s no one around to hear him out. Thanks to timezones, it’s even later in Vineland, and Hannah and Daryl are surely asleep. He’s never felt so alone. He could always tell his mom anything, no matter what time of day or night, and she always had a way of making him feel heard. He misses that. He hasn’t missed her so hard since she died, until now, hovering thirty thousand feet above ground, thirty thousand and six above where she was buried.
Will closes his eyes and tilts his head against the back of his seat, a lump forming in his throat. Despite himself, he feels a few tears threatening to escape, but just gives up on stopping them. What’s the point? Everyone’s asleep. Once the floodgates are open, it’s almost impossible to stop them, and the tears just keep rolling down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. He screws up his face to stop something embarrassing like a sob escaping.
“Uh–”
Will jumps practically a foot into the air, and with panicked, wet eyes, sees that Jett is awake. She’s looking at him with round, yellow eyes that beam through the darkness like headlights, and she seems shocked, yet slightly confused, maybe even concerned.
“Oh my god,” Will mutters, sniffling and wiping his cheeks with the backs of his forearms.
“Are you–” Jett starts.
“I’m fine!” Will says, a little too loud, but it’s betrayed by the way his voice cracks. He tries his best to force out a laugh, a high-pitched, nervous thing. “I’m fine, sorry, did I wake you? That’s my bad, lemme just–”
He gets up to retreat to the bathroom to try and save some of his dignity, but then Jett is standing too, and then Olivia is raising her head from where she had tucked it into her wing.
“Will?” she asks sleepily, squinting through the dim light, before she gasps, hopping to her feet. “Are you okay? Were you crying?”
And of course she has no concept of volume control, so that rouses Archie, who’s a light sleeper anyway (probably borne of having two young daughters), and Lenny too. And having basically the whole team’s attention on him at once (bar Modo, who’s probably curled up in a corner somewhere) is way too much for him right now, so he waves off their questioning stares and curious paws and practically sprints to the bathroom.
“Oh my god,” Will groans, running his hooves down his face as he sinks to the floor, back pressed against the door. He’s breathing loudly, chest heaving up and down with the humiliation of what just happened. Jett, his childhood hero, catching him crying in the middle of the night would be bad enough, but the others too? He’s worked so hard to make them see him as an equal, not just some stupid kid but an actual equal and asset to the team on and off the court, and he might have just ruined all that in a matter of minutes.
He splashes some water on his face and stares at his red-rimmed eyes in the mirror above the sink, sniffling angrily. He plans to just hang out in here, maybe– how long has it even been? Five minutes? Well, if he stays for long enough, maybe everyone will just forget what happened and go back to sleep, and they’ll never have to talk about it. This is a good plan for about five more minutes, when he starts getting insanely bored, having left his phone on his seat outside, but he’s determined to hold on.
There’s a knock on the door. “Will?” comes Jett’s voice, uncharacteristically wary. “You in there?”
“No,” Will calls, before wincing.
“Right,” Jett says dryly, and he can just imagine what expression she’s making. “Wanna come out?”
Will flushes the toilet for no good reason and then unlocks the door, feeling like a little kid going to tell his mom he broke a window while he was shooting hoops. He half expects the whole team to be crowded around the bathroom door, but it’s just Jett in her casual tracksuit, Lenny and Archie and Olivia nowhere to be seen.
“I told them I’d handle it,” Jett says, answering his unasked question.
“What? Wh– handle what?” Will asks, scratching the back of his head and avoiding her gaze. “There’s nothing to handle here, we’re all cool.”
“Will, you were obviously crying,” Jett says, as no-nonsense and straightforward as ever. “We have to talk about it.”
Will’s ears droop. “Do we really have to?”
Jett snorts, cuffing him on the back of the head. “Come on.”
She leads him to the middle room of the jet where they usually play cards, and the lights turn on automatically. The curtain to the main seating area is drawn, so they can’t see the others, but Will can hear them muttering in there. He dearly hopes it isn’t about him and how he’s some kind of basket case, or just an immature kid who can’t handle the stress of professional roarball.
He and Jett sit across from each other at the table, and he feels like they’re about to play poker or something with the way he can’t read her face at all. He wishes he had the same power. He feels like she’s reading him like an open book. Downplay, downplay, downplay, he chants in his head.
He traces the grain of the wooden tabletop with a nail. There’s a deep scar running down it, which is new. A few days ago, Jett lost so badly at Uno that she unsheathed her claws and swept all the cards onto the ground, leaving the mark in her wake. Will doesn’t know why they bother playing Uno these days. Ever since they found out that Modo is good enough at it to win the entire ownership of the team with his skills, it’s more like a competition to see who can come second.
“So are you gonna start talking, or…” Jett says sarcastically.
“Well you’re the one making me,” Will mutters darkly. He dearly wishes he was asleep in his seat right now. Or everyone else was and he was just doomscrolling himself into a stupor. Then he sighs. “I’m just– homesick–”
“Don’t even try that with me,” Jett rolls her eyes. “We were in Vineland, like, two weeks ago.”
“What, so I can’t be homesick?” Will asks haughtily, throws his hooves in the air. “I didn’t know you were, like, the emperor of homesickness.”
“Will,” Jett says seriously, uncrossing her arms to fold them on the table and lean towards him. He has no choice but to meet her intense gaze. “All I’m asking is for you to be real with me, okay? If you don’t want to tell me what’s up with you, then fine. I’ll tell the others to back off and we can all go back to sleep and forget about it. But don’t insult my intelligence by lying to me. We can all tell you’ve been acting off for a couple weeks.”
Will chews at his bottom lip. He doesn’t know what he wants. At this point, he’d say Jett is a pretty good friend, as unreal as that sounds. They got a few months off between last season and this one, and after their winning press tours Jett had to spend most of the time recovering at home, since her leg was all messed up. But in September, they had spent a lot of time together, hanging out at all of his favourite haunts around Vineland and playing pickup with local teams just for fun. She came to the diner a few times and gave Hannah and Daryl signed jerseys (of course, Will signed too). They even went to a concert together. He loves the relationship they have right now, one of playful banter but also mutual respect. He doesn’t want to ruin that by unloading all of his baggage on her.
But she’s like, twice his size and staring right at him and he’s so tired and he’s never told anyone this. There are so many new people in his life, his teammates and coach and members of their staff, and he even has some friends on other teams now, real legends of the game. And he wants to talk about his mom, he wants to point to a player that was her favourite or like, he eats a food and wants to say that nothing will ever live up to way his mom cooked it, but then– it’ll come up, inevitably. And it’ll be like a dark cloud over the conversation and he can just never talk about his mom in any context and it really, really sucks.
“You remember my mom died, right?” he starts slowly. It’s not like he has to give a lot of detail. Jett nods. He told her as much when she visited Whiskers for the first time.
“It was today,” he says. Laughs. “Like, not today. Today’s the anniversary. So yeah.”
He clears his throat. “Yeah, so like, that’s it. I kinda got in my feelings about it, but that’s it, I’m all good–”
“Will.”
He looks up, and to his surprise, she’s rounded the table and is right next to him, not really crouching – she’s really tall – but bent over towards his level, and when he doesn’t move she puts a giant paw on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s really hard.”
That stupid, traitorous lump is back in Will’s throat. He just nods dumbly.
“Do you want to talk about her?”
Once he starts talking, he just can’t stop. She was so smart, and hardworking, and funny. She always tried to make him laugh, and most of the time succeeded, even if he groaned and pretended she was embarrassing him. He made her laugh even more. She never dated, because she said Will was the only man she needed in her life. She got sad when she saw planes passing overhead because it made her think about people saying goodbye to each other. She loved tomatoes, but hated ketchup. She worked double shifts to buy Will his first pair of roarball shoes as a surprise. She always believed he would make it to the big leagues.
At some point, he realizes he’s started crying again, not ugly crying but kind of happy crying. He’s still embarrassed but Jett’s been nodding along this whole time, and now she actually is crouched on the floor, looking up at him with her hand still on his shoulder. Her face is– kind. Sort of unsure but still listening and nodding along.
“Sounds like she really loved you,” she says.
“Yeah,” Will agrees, then laughs a laugh that turns into a sob. “I miss her so bad. I miss her. I wish she was here–”
He drops his head, but it gets cushioned by Jett’s shoulder, because she’s lurched up to pull him into a hug. It’s pretty nice, he thinks. Jett isn’t all that touchy, anyway, so it means more coming from her.
“It’s okay,” Jett murmurs, rubbing his shaking back. “It’s okay.” Will shakes his head.
“I wanted her to see me,” he says, voice muffled. “I wanted to make her proud.”
“Kid,” Jett says, pulling back to look him in the eyes. “From what I hear, she already was proud of you. She already knew you’d do great things. You’re just proving her right.”
Will half shrugs, wiping his cheek with his shoulder.
Jett looks contemplative for a moment. “Do you want to go visit?”
It takes him a second to realize what she means. “Like, her grave?”
Jett makes a face like a deer caught in headlights, which is kind of a hilarious expression to see on a huge panther. “You didn’t have time when we played at the Greenhouse, right? We left pretty quickly. I mean, unless you don’t want to, it was probably a bad idea–”
“No, no, I want to,” Will says, giving her a watery smile. “That would be cool. Would you come with me?”
Jett looks taken aback, but recovers quickly. “If that’s what you want.”
“Yeah,” he nods. “Like I said, you were my favourite player, as a kid. I want to introduce my mom to you.”
Jett bumps him in the shoulder. “Only as a kid?”
“I mean, yeah,” he grins, “there’s a new goat on the court now. Kind of hard to compete with that.”
“Your favourite player can’t be yourself,” Jett objects, and they keep ribbing each other as they reenter the sitting area, where the others are either asleep or pretending to be. When they land the next morning, they all act like nothing happened, which Will is grateful for, except they’re not very good actors so Olivia is still overly kind towards him, giving him first choice of the rooms (even though they’re all the same) and not letting anyone pick on him too much. Lenny rehearses some bars he’s been working out with him and Archie shows him new pictures of his daughters on his phone. He appreciates the thought.
They have to play the Sandstorm at their home arena (they win, 135-119), but after that, there’s a gap day where they fly back to Vineland. Will is kind of guilty about taking the jet, suggesting he and Jett fly public so the others don’t have to travel on their break day, but no one really seems to care. Jett suggests the whole team visit Whiskers while they’re in the city, as she’s the only one other than Will who’s been, and she hypes up the pie so much that they all get excited about the trip.
“Will!” two voices cheer as they enter the diner, and the goat is quickly swallowed in a hug by his two friends, Hannah and Daryl. Clearly, they had been informed of their arrival in advance.
“What am I, chopped liver?” Jett asks, secretly amused. It’s kind of funny how the regulars of the diner, despite the fact that they have her merchandise and paraphernalia strung up all over the place, have gotten over the celebrity-awe of her presence with how much she’s visited. They all keep eating and commenting on the game playing on the television as she ducks through the doorway.
It still goes dead quiet, though, when Archie, Lenny, Modo and Olivia file in behind her. The power of all six Thorns players at once is too much to handle. Carol practically has to bat off the crowds of people screaming for autographs and for Modo to marry them with a broomstick to get them a table.
“Can I get you six slices of pies, then?” the owner asks, leading them to a large booth after she had hugged Will in greeting.
“Just four, I think,” Will tells her, glancing up at Jett questioningly. She nods.
“We’ll come back to eat after, just got a quick errand to run,” she smiles, and she and Will slip out the back way.
This part of Vineland is nice. It’s as bustling as the rest of the city, yet somehow more peaceful, more tight-knit with the way everyone seems to know each other. Will has already shown her around most of the places he grew up. It’s a poorer area: there’s less infrastructure, more crime, and the train servicing the upper parts of the city trundles overhead rudely. That’s where Jett grew up, practically a whole world away. While she’s a Vineland native herself, she hadn’t seen all the corners of the city, its hidden gems and (delicious) secrets, until Will introduced them to her.
He leads her about fifteen minutes away to a communal graveyard, but stops at the gate, looking out on the rows and rows of stone markers.
“Do you come here often?” Jett asks.
“Haven’t been since the funeral,” Will says without turning around. She starts wondering if it was a bad idea to suggest coming here, but he’s already picking his way through the tall grass, trying to remember–
“Here,” he says, breathless, stopping abruptly. Jett stoops slightly to read the slightly lopsided rock. LOUISE HARRIS. MOTHER, FRIEND. Died in 2024.
With little preamble, Will plops himself on the ground in front of it, legs crossed. “Hi Mom–”
He cuts himself off, looking up at Jett in panic. “We didn’t bring flowers! Shoot, I totally forgot!”
He looks so much like a little kid that Jett can’t help but laugh. He pouts at her.
“Kid, I doubt she minds.” She jerks a thumb behind her. “Do you want me to give you some–”
“No!” Will says emphatically, grabbing her paw and yanking her to sit down next to him. “You’re the whole reason we’re here!”
“Mom,” he says, turning back to the grave and sounding excited now. “This is Jett! The Jett Fillmore!”
Jett waves hesitantly at the gravestone. This is so, so weird. But Will, if he’s anything, is chatty. It’s one of his most endearing qualities, Jett thinks. Now that she knows, and likes, Will enough to see him as anything more than a pain in her ass.
“Sorry I haven’t visited you,” he mutters, suddenly somber. He lays a hoof on the stone, brushing away a dead leaf. “I’ve been really busy. Since I got drafted into the Thorns, I mean.”
Jett doesn’t point out that he didn’t seem to have visited in the year prior to that, either. He’s entitled to his reasons.
“But it’s been so fire, Mom!” he brightens up again. “I mean, we won the Claw last year! And I scored the winning shot, it was insane!”
He rambles on and on for a while, as though Jett isn’t even there, telling his mom about basically every game they’ve played since he joined the team with slightly exaggerated details. She doesn’t mind, though. It’s kind of fun to hear the season, the current and past one, through his perspective. She barely remembers what it was like to be a rookie and have that much passion for the game. Of course she’s still passionate, but she doesn’t know if she ever loved the game itself as much as Will. Even if he never made it to ROAR, she doesn’t doubt that he would’ve kept playing at the cage for the rest of his life, breaking the ankles of bigs and doing situps in that garage where he was living before getting signed.
“I miss you, Mom,” Will says, catching Jett’s attention from where she had been playing with the grass. Her bad leg is starting to ache a little, the way it does when she’s been sitting for too long, but she’s loathe to stand up and disturb him. “But you were right. I changed the game, Mom. And– and I got to play with Jett Fillmore.” He lowers his voice playfully, leaning towards the gravestone as though he’s about to share a secret. “And Mom, don’t tell anyone, but she’s secretly a total softy!”
Jett pushes him in the shoulder, shaking her head with an amused smile. He falls sideways, cackling.
“But yeah, she’s super nice to me, and like, helpful? Like she gives me tips and all that, and we practice together all the time, which is fun.” He looks up at Jett out of the corner of his eyes, all shy, before quickly looking away again. This kid, she thinks to herself. Totally shameless. Where does he get the nerve? Well, she supposes the answer is right in front of her. “Everyone else is super nice, too. Archie, and Lenny and Olivia, and Modo too. Actually he’s kind of weird, but he isn’t mean or anything. Archie has two daughters too, Adi and Ari, and he brings them along sometimes. I like them ‘cause they’re fun, kind of like how you said I was hyperactive as a kid? They’re twice as bad!” he laughs.
Jett privately thinks that Will just enjoys not being the youngest ‘kid’ when Archie’s toddler daughters are around.
“I got a lot of good people behind me now, Mom. And you too, right? You watch all my games? I bet you cheer me on like, Will! Will! Will!” he mimes, punching his fists in the air. “Anyway. We won yesterday, and I have a feeling we’ll make it to the playoffs again. So I’ll win another Claw for you.” He kisses his hoof and presses it against the gravestone. “Love you.”
“Ready to go?” Jett asks when he doesn’t move. He shrugs, not looking away from his mom’s name carved into the stone. Louise.
Jett shuffles closer, ignoring the pang in her leg as they kneel side by side. “Hi… Louise,” Jett says, name feeling foreign in her mouth. She ignores Will’s surprised look as she continues. “I’m Jett. Fillmore. I’m your son’s teammate. When he first joined the team…” She shakes her head. “I didn’t act like I should have. I said some things that were wrong, and I underestimated him. Truth is, your son’s the best player the Thorns have had in a long time. The whole league, even. I’m proud to play with him, and to be his friend. I’m sure you know, but you have a really great kid here. I promise we’ll all take care of him, so you have nothing to worry about.”
She pats the stone twice, suddenly awkward, then stands to her full height, clearing her throat. “Grassy,” she mutters, dusting off the knees of her pants.
“I’m the best player the Thorns have had in a long time?” Will asks. She looks down, and he’s standing near her elbow with a goofy, idiotic grin.
“I lied,” Jett deadpans, turning to leave. He screeches, scurrying after her.
“No, you said that! You said it! You can’t take it back!”
“I meant once I retire, obviously!” she shoots back. “You won’t be the best as long as I’m still in the game!”
They chase each other all the way back to the diner, then burst through the front door, panting and sweaty.
“I win!” Will announces to all the patrons, pumping a fist in the air. There’s some scattered applause at whatever it is they think he’s won.
“I’m incapacitated!” Jett says, aghast, as she gestures to her leg. Will anyone see the injustice? The disrespect? They don’t. Will slips into the booth with the rest of the team, who are already on their second round of pie, and steals a bite from Modo’s plate, who roars in anger.
“I’ll get you your own, honey, don’t get yourself killed,” Carol says, unconcerned as she ducks behind the counter. Jett seats herself at one of the red barstools.
“Make that two,” she requests, resting her head on a paw.
“Where did you guys go?” Carol asks, neutrally curious. “You were gone for almost an hour.”
“We went to visit Will’s mom,” Jett says in a low voice, although there’s no chance she’ll be overheard over the din. A glance over at the booth tells her that Will has been drawn into whatever debate they’re having, defending his points with wide gestures and full body movements that threaten to take someone’s eye out, if he weren’t so much shorter than everyone else at the table. His friends are leaning over the back of the adjacent booth, and it seems that the people at the surrounding tables are also hanging onto his every word. He does have a gift for storytelling.
“Oh,” Carol says in a small voice, hoof over her heart. “That’s nice. I’m glad you went with him. I go sometimes, to leave flowers, but he never wanted to visit. Must have hurt too much, poor boy.”
Jett shakes her head. “It must have been hard on him, to lose his mom at such a young age.”
Carol nods. “It was. He didn’t have any other family, so I became his legal guardian. But he insisted on doing everything on his own, you know? I’ve got kids of my own, and I would have happily put him up, but he didn’t want to be a bother…”
Jett frowns, straightening up. “Legal guardian?”
“Of course,” Carol says, sliding two pieces of pie onto two plates. “I don’t know if he told you, but his mother used to work here at Whiskers. She was like a sister to me, and Will like a nephew.”
“No, I mean– How old was Will when his– when it happened?”
Carol looks up at the ceiling for a moment in thought. “Well, it was right around this time of year, so he must have been fif– no, fourteen.”
Fourteen. Two years ago. Fourteen, plus two. Sixteen.
“FOURTEEN?!” Jett shouts, jumping to her feet. The stool clatters to the floor. That is definitely heard over the sounds of conversation and laughter, which grind to a halt.
“Fourteen?” Will repeats warily. Jett turns to him, stalking back over to the table.
“Will,” she say slowly, “why didn’t you tell any of us that you’re sixteen years old?”
The kid – literally a kid – looks up at her with surprised green eyes. To her slight satisfaction, her other teammates seem to be sharing in her shock. Lenny’s jaw has dropped, Olivia’s fingers are frozen over her phone screen where she had been frantically typing away, and Archie, who’s usually impossible to faze, has raised his eyebrows as high as it’s probably possible for them to go.
“Is it a big deal or something…?” Will asks hesitantly.
“Oh my god,” Archie says, looking down at his empty plate in horror.
“Dude,” Lenny says, craning his neck to look Will in the eyes. “That is a big deal.”
“Why?” the young goat asks, completely oblivious.
“Why?” Jett repeats incredulously, her open paws facing upwards and claws drawn. She wants to shake him by the shoulders. “Because– for god’s sake–” This is the kid who she told, at his first press conference, that he could be killed on the court! The kid that she pushed into freezing ice water with barely a second thought! The kid who got slammed into a metal pole headfirst by Mane!
“Will,” Olivia says gently, laying a wing on his shoulder, because she’s the one out of the two of them who actually knows how to communicate her concerns like a normal animal, “roarball is really dangerous.”
“Not to mention,” Archie says, “is that even legal? Does ROAR have an age minimum?” Modo is licking his empty plate, completely unconcerned with legalities.
“Uh, I mean, the youngest player of all time was fifteen,” Will says, shrugging. “So I didn’t think it was a big deal. Flo didn’t actually ask my age when she signed me so I figured it was cool.”
“You ‘figured it was cool,’” Jett mutters, massaging her temples to fight off the migraine she can feel coming on. Why does she even bother? She should just accept that she’ll have a five-foot-eleven migraine haunting her career until she retires. In fact, no, even after she retires, she’s sure he’ll be following her around, making incessant requests and disrespectful jabs. And even after she dies, he’ll show up at her grave just to keep yapping. What a sobering thought.
“You took on Mane as a teenager,” Lenny says, struck with realization. Jett feels sick.
“And he broke his ankles,” Daryl pipes up, Hannah nodding along.
“Respect,” Lenny nods, offering a fistbump that Will happily pumps, grinning.
“No,” Jett says, “no, no, do not fistbump to that.”
Will cranes his neck to look at her, standing with her arms crossed, and smirks. “Yo, are you just mad that you keep getting hard carried by a sixteen-year-old?”
Jett narrows her eyes as a few people ‘oooh’ around them. “You wanna back that talk up with some action?”
Will hops up from his seat, bouncing on his toes. “Thought you’d never ask!”
“Okay, okay, please take it outside,” Carol says, sliding two more plates of pie onto the table.
They eat first. Then they take it outside. Everyone in the diner, even Carol, files out to spectate. They decide on playing a 1v1, first to seven, but Jett doesn’t doubt that it’ll devolve into a 3v3 once their teammates get too antsy to just sit on the sidelines and watch.
“Go Will!” Daryl shouts, waving a ‘Harris’ jersey that he’s procured from somewhere like a flag. Their audience clamours other encouragements.
“I feel like this crowd is a little biased,” Jett snarks, not really minding.
“Can’t help if they’re biased towards greatness,” Will laughs, spinning the ball on the tip of his hoof to show off.
“Greatness? Kid, how about you make it to adulthood first.”
“I’m really gonna regret you figuring out my age, huh,” Will mumbles.
“Hey, age is just a number,” Jett shrugs, getting into the ready position. She knows that better than most. “What matters is how you carry yourself. Look at me, for example.”
Will laughs, dribbling and shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah, you’re the goat. Not ready to pass that torch yet?”
“I reckon I’ve still got a few more years,” she grins. Will? He’s still young, too young. He’s unsteady on his feet and has stars in his eyes and has more than a bit of growing up to do. But she can’t wait to see him do it. Even though Louise can’t be here, she silently promises the mammal, who really must have been only a few years older than her, that she’ll take care of her son. She’ll be here when he turns seventeen, then eighteen, and so on, and she has no doubt that someday, he’ll be the best in the league, one of the best of all time. He’ll definitely surpass Jett herself. In some ways he already has.
(But for now she demolishes him, because a little public humiliation is good for his development.)