Chapter Text
Hayden Pike is a good man. Atleast, he thinks he is. He loves his wife, adores his children, lets them run circles around him with only a minimal amount of grumbling. And he loves Shane Hollander, his best and only true friend in the world.
Life has been good to him till now. He plays professional hockey for one of the best teams in the world, has won not one but two Stanley cups with them, and he has more money than he logically needs even with his huge family. He may not be the best player in the league, or even in his own team, but he knows he's better than most.
So he should be happy. He should be happy, right? It doesn't matter that Shane left Montreal last season, going to Ottawa of all places. He hates that he had to go, with his team treating him so badly by the end that he'd seen Shane have at least two panic attacks while in the arena. The Metros treated him horribly, the people who were supposed to be his friends, but they were all homophobic assholes and their opinion shouldn't matter to him anymore.
He's always tried to stick up for Shane when he was still in Montreal, kept more than a few of the worst of the slurs his teammates spoke from ever reaching his friend's ears. So what if that made Hayden an outcast too? It was worth it to help his best friend. It didn't matter that his teammates had stopped interacting with him as much too.
But then Shane had left, and selfishly he'd hoped it would get better with his team. He hoped that without him having to pick fights everyday for Shane, things would go back to normal, or as close to normal as they could be without his best friend there. But they hadn't.
Hayden can't remember the last time one of the Metros had touched him in a friendly way. There had been no shoulder pats, no fist bumps, no arms thrown over his shoulder in celebration when he scored a goal.
Jackie had taken the kids on a month-long cruise over the Caribbean, and he'd been more than happy for them. The girls deserved the break during their summer holidays, even if he himself needed to stay for preseason. They facetimed every night, and seeing the tanned, smiling face of his wife and their children was the highlight of his day. She took them directly to her parents house for the rest of summer, the kids desperate to see their cousins. And Hayden is ok with it, really he is!
They've done this before, this isn't the first summer he's spent alone in his house, it shouldn't bother him so much.
Still, something was wrong. He doesn't know what it is, but he's been feeling off for days. Like his skin was too small for him, too itchy and too tight. He has no idea what's happening, he's never felt like this before.
Usually, Jackie is always right besides him, his best friend and the best partner he could ever ask for. She always knows what he's trying to say, what he's feeling better than even he himself does sometimes. If not her, he has Shane to talk things over with. The other man was always on the bed besides his or in a house 10 minutes drive away.
But ever since Shane left, they'd slowly stopped talking as much as they usually did. Shane kept sending him photos of his new team, of the house he shared with Rozanov (don't even get him started on those two, he was happy that his friend had found love, but did it have to be Rozanov?), of the puppy they'd adopted. He could see how Shane had started smiling wider, less stressed with his new teammates who seemed to be exceptionally accepting of their captain and assistant captain being together. The joy that Hayden usually caught only glimpses of was basically rolling off of his best friend.
And Hayden was happy for them, truly. He's said that already, hasn't he? But he is. And so their conversations had slowly petered out. He knows Shane thinks it's weird, but Hayden doesn't want to tell Shane about his own problems, not when Shane had been through something so much worse, those last few months in Montreal. (He can see Shane frowning at him in his head, telling him that he shouldn't be comparing their problems and that he's here for Hayden, but he's always been good at ignoring the Shane in his head. Usually it was just his nagging for Hayden to eat healthier, but this wasn't that different in practice.)
So he keeps quiet, and he texts less, and he misses his family but he doesn't want to bother his wife, and the bad feeling steadily gets worse.
He hasn't had a normal conversation with the Metros in months, not since they basically declared him persona non grata by association. Hayden doesn't realise it, but by the time their first game of the season starts (against Ottawa, and boy does he have some mixed feelings about that), Jackie and the kids are not due back for another few days, and he hasn't been touched for more than a month.
Add that with the cold shoulder he's receiving from his so called friends, Hayden is basically miserable without knowing why.
The wave builds and builds, coming to a head and crests on the day they play the Centaurs.