Work Text:
GOLD, OR THE WEIGHT OF IT
When the final horn sounds, Nico is ecstatic. It’s supposed to be simple.
Nico has watched enough hockey to know how the story usually goes: the last second bleeds out, gloves fly, a pile of bodies collapses in a mess of joy and skates and shattered discipline. There’s a sacredness to it, almost – a reminder that even grown men with sponsorships and PR managers still carry the child inside them that loved something so purely it hurt less to give everything up for it than to stop playing.
He sits alone on the edge of the couch, knees drawn up, remote in one hand, his phone in the other like a talisman. The apartment around him is quiet in that pre-dawn way, even though it’s not dawn, not really. It only feels like it because the lights are low and the air has that late-winter bite that slips through window seams no matter how well you think you sealed them.
On screen, the USA hockey team is a storm of red and blue, a glittering spill of bodies, sticks, helmets. The camera finds his boyfriend – Jack Hughes – face flushed, hair damp, a grin so bright it looks like it might split him in two.
Nico’s chest tightens with something warm and golden. Pride, yes. Relief. A tenderness so practiced it’s muscle memory: That’s him. That’s my love.
He smiles before he can stop himself. He imagines the call he’ll get later – breathless, excited, Jack talking too fast, voice hoarse from shouting. He imagines the medal pressed into Nico’s palm like a promise. Look, look, Neeks, I did it. He imagines the way Jack will want to celebrate; loud music, champagne, too many friends, laughter spilling out of the apartment like confetti, sex.
Nico imagines all of it. He basks in the feeling before opening Instagram to repost something to his story that is both for Jack and something neutral enough not to rouse suspicion.
Then, he clicks on usahockey’s story.
The camera shows a locker room: bright tiles, damp hair, jerseys half-off shoulders, embarrassing ski googles. The gold of medals glints against skin. Someone holds a phone up. Someone puts it on speaker. The team clusters around as if around a campfire.
The voice that comes through the speaker is instantly recognizable – not because it is beloved, but because it has been everywhere for years, a permanent bruise on the airwaves. The human embodiment of everything that was wrong with this godforsaken country of opposites on the phone tells a joke. The joke is cruel in the easy way cruelty often is for powerful men. It degrades woman In such a blatant way that Nico feels sick with it.
There’s a pause – an inhalation across the room.
Then laughter.
It starts scattered. A few uncertain chuckles. The sound of men checking the room before committing. Nico wants scoff. Fucking Tkachuks.
And then Jack laughs.
It’s a clean laugh. Bright. Uncomplicated. The same laugh he uses when Nico steals fries off his plate. The same laugh he uses when a teammate trips in practice. The same laugh he uses when he is happy and unguarded and, worst of all, safe.
Nico’s smile collapses. He feels it physically, like a thread snapping somewhere behind his ribs. On screen, Jack leans into the phone with the earnest delight of someone meeting a childhood idol. He says something about honour. He says something about the White House. He says something about tradition and pride.
The man on the phone says something back, and the room laughs again.
Nico doesn’t hear the rest. He hears the shape of it. The ease.
The way Jack’s face looks in that moment – open, pleased, proud. The way he stands like he belongs there. Like the world has always belonged to him. That he is owed all this fucking space he is taking up with his stupid bloody grin, missing teeth and all.
Nico’s fingers tighten around his phone until it aches.
He thinks of all the nights Jack had dragged him into crowded rooms, hand warm at the small of his back, guiding him through the noise with the confidence of someone who has never had to wonder whether he’ll be welcome. He thinks of Pride nights at arenas and the way Jack would smile for the camera with rainbow tape on his stick, the way he’d squeeze Nico’s hand under the table and say, softly, I’ve got you.
He thinks of the times having him felt like safety.
And he thinks, now, of how easily safety can become a kind of blindness. The story ends. The screen shifts to the next story; to the ice, to celebration, to flags and anthems, to the crowd roaring.
Nico sits very still.
The apartment is suddenly too quiet, as if the world has stepped back to watch what he will do with this.
He reaches for the remote and pauses the broadcast on TV on Jack’s face mid-laugh. Mid-laugh. As if joy is a thing that can be stopped, pinned down, examined for its rot. His phone buzzes immediately – messages from friends, from teammates, from his brother: GOLD!!! Did you see? Your man!!
Nico doesn’t answer.
He watches the story again. Watches it again. Then again.
The second time is worse, because there is no shock to buffer it. There is only the sharp clarity of what he saw. The third time is the cruellest, because he begins to notice details: the way Jack glances around before laughing, as if checking whether it’s allowed – then laughs anyway. The way someone claps him on the shoulder like he’s done the right thing. The way the laughter is not just laughter, but a performance of belonging. Or an admittance. Or a confession.
Nico’s stomach turns.
A soft part of him tries to excuse it. He’s young. He’s excited. He doesn’t understand. It was a moment.
But Nico has lived long enough to know that moments are often where the truth slips out. You don’t plan them. You don’t edit them. They are the unfiltered self.
He sits here, in this apartment he shares with his love, and can’t fucking breath. His phone buzzes again. This time, it’s Jack. Nico stares at the name on the screen until the call stops on its own. He watches the notification disappear, replaced by a text almost immediately:
JACK: BABE. DID YOU SEE?? WE WON. I LOVE YOU. I’M COMING HOME SOON.
Nico’s throat tightens.
Home. The word sits heavy, suddenly strange.
He looks around the living room – at the framed photo on the shelf of them at their lake house in summer, Jack laughing, Nico squinting into the sun; at the hoodie tossed over a chair, Jack’s hoodie, too big for Nico’s shoulders; at the pair of sneakers by the door, laces loose, ready. This place is full of Jack. Full of them. Full of the life they built in the cracks between road trips and games and interviews.
Nico sets his phone down like it might burn him. He presses a palm against his sternum, as if he can physically hold himself together. He whispers, to the empty room, “What did you do?”
There is no answer.
Only the paused image on the TV: Jack’s mouth open in laughter, teeth missing, eyes bright, medal gleaming.
☂︎
Jack comes home a few days later with a gold medal and the kind of joy that is loud enough to drown out doubt. He hasn’t heard from Nico yet. Privately, he thinks his boyfriend might be nursing a hurt ego, considering Switzerland’s poor performance in the Olympics. And honestly, the last few days have been such a rush. Fuck. In a way, he expects this track record to continue. He expects the apartment to erupt when he opens the door – expects music, balloons, maybe Nico’s favourite pastries lined up on the counter because Nico is always softer when there’s only the two of them, so sweet in a all the right ways.
Instead, the lock turns easily, and the silence inside hits him like a cold rink door slamming shut. The hallway smells wrong – cleaner than usual. Not lived-in. Not warm.
“Babe?” Jack calls, voice almost echoing.
No footsteps. No laugh. No welcome home, idiot tossed over a shoulder. He walks further in, medal bouncing against his chest. The living room is… stripped. Not empty, exactly. But curated. Neutral. Like a room staged for sale. The photo on the shelf is gone. His hoodie is gone.
Nico’s sneakers, that he always nags him about, by the door are gone.
Jack’s stomach drops so suddenly he has to grab the back of the couch to steady himself. He looks around like he’s misremembering the layout, like the room has been swapped out while he was gone.
On the counter, there’s a single envelope. His name in Nico’s handwriting: neat, slightly slanted, careful. Jack picks it up with shaking hands and opens it.
Inside, a key.
And a note.
Jack, it begins.
The handwriting is steady. Almost too steady.
I need space. I’m staying somewhere else for a while.
Jack’s breath catches.
The note continues, simple and devastating in its restraint:
Please don’t come looking for me. I’m not ready to speak to you.
Jack reads it twice. Three times.
The word please is the thing that breaks him a little. Nico never says please to him until it’s gotten too bad, unless he is trying very hard not to start begging.
Jack drops his bag on the floor. The medal swings, heavy and ridiculous.
He pulls out his phone with frantic fingers.
JACK: What the fuck? Where are you? Are you okay?
No response.
He calls. It goes to voicemail. He calls again. Voicemail. What the fuck, he thinks to himself. What the fuck is happening?
He stands there in the ruined quiet and realizes, with a sick jolt, that the apartment is not home without Nico. He sinks onto the couch, staring at the blank space where the photo used to be. His medal glints in the low light.
Gold and useless.
☂︎
Nico doesn’t answer that night. He doesn’t answer the next morning, either. He watches the phone buzz and buzz and buzz until the battery drops low and the screen dims like an exhausted eye. He is sitting in a different place now: a friend’s spare room, bare walls, unfamiliar sheets. There’s a small window with a view of a parking lot and a strip of winter sky. He keeps thinking that he should feel dramatic about it.
But he doesn’t.
He feels hollow.
He feels like someone has quietly removed the floor from under him and he’s been falling ever since, just without the wind in his ears.
When he finally answers, it is not because he is ready. It is because he knows that if he doesn’t, Jack will do something desperate and public and messy, and Nico cannot bear the thought of his private pain becoming entertainment.
He texts a single address.
A time.
Nothing else.
Jack arrives early because waiting has never been something he does well. He is the most impatient person on this planet. Nico used to think of it fondly, now it just makes him incredibly mad. Everything wonderful loving thing he ever thought feels tainted, feels stained by the knowledge that, at the end of the day, Jack fucking Hughes is just like the other guys that used to bully him for being… different? He can’t fucking fathom it. Poor Ellen Hughes but well, she did raise Jack. Maybe she’s just as bad. He doesn’t fucking know anymore. All Hughes have tried to reach him and he had declined all calls and ignored all texts. He just wants to go home. His flight leaves in a few hours. He has already contacted his agent, requesting a trade.
Nico watches Jack from the window.
He stands outside the building with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, looking up at the windows, trying to guess which one is Nico’s. The streetlight turns the snowbanks a sickly yellow.
He brought the medal. Jack doesn’t know why. Maybe because he thinks it proves something. That he can still give Nico things. That he is still someone Nico should be proud of. He hears footsteps behind him and turns too fast.
Nico is thinner than Jack remembers – they haven’t seen each other for almost a month with the Olympics and all that came after. It is only by a little, but enough to make guilt slam into Jack’s throat. His hair is messier, his eyes shadowed. He wears a coat Jack doesn’t recognize.
And in that moment, something settles in his stomach with horrifying clarity. It feels like Nico has already started building a life without him.
“Nico,” Jack says, voice cracking.
Nico’s gaze drops immediately to the medal around Jack’s neck. Something flickers across his face – pain, maybe, or anger, or something colder.
“Congratulations,” Nico says.
It should sound kind. It doesn’t. Jack reaches for him instinctively, hand lifting –
Nico steps back. The space between them becomes endless. Jack’s hand falls.
“Why didn’t you answer?” Jack demands, too sharp, too panicked. “I came home and you were – your stuff was–”
“I know,” Nico says quietly. “That was the point.”
Jack stares at him.
“What point? You can’t just – what is this? What the fuck are you doing?”
Nico exhales slowly, as if he’s been holding his breath for days.
“I watched it,” he says. Jack blinks. “Watched what?”
Nico’s eyes lift. They are painfully steady now. “The video,” he says. “The call.”
Jack’s mouth opens, then closes.
“Oh.” He lets out a breath that sounds almost like relief. “That?”
Nico’s face hardens. “That,” he repeats, as if tasting the word.
Jack tries to laugh – small, awkward, a charm reflex. “Babe, come on. It was just – everyone was in the room. It was a moment. We won gold.”
Nico’s voice is very soft when he says, “You laughed.”
Jack frowns. “Yeah, it was a joke.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“Sure, it wasn’t – Come on, Neeks, it wasn’t that deep.”
The words leave Jack’s mouth before he can catch them. The instant they land, he sees Nico flinch. It’s tiny. Barely a movement. Like a bruise being pressed. Jack’s stomach drops.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Nico is quietly furious. “First of all, it was fucking misogynistic, that’s what it was. I can’t believe you. And Trump? Going to the White House?” His voice is a hiss. “Are you aware that I am a queer immigrant, Jack Hughes? You stood there before all these men that want people like me – like us – deported or put in conversion therapy or dead? Talking about how proud you are of this country?”
“I didn’t mean–”
“Yes, you did,” Nico interrupts, voice suddenly soft, and somehow that is worse than shouting. “That’s the problem. You meant it.”
Jack scrubs a hand over his face, frustrated, desperate. “I meant– Neeks, that is politics. I don’t want politics in everything. I just want – can’t it just be hockey for once?”
Nico looks at him for a long moment. Then he says, very quietly, “It’s never just hockey.”
Jack swallows. “What does that even mean?”
“It means,” Nico says, “that you get to treat it like it’s a game and a tradition and an honor. You get to stand in rooms and laugh and feel celebrated and safe.”
Nico knows that he is being unfair. Jack couldn’t help being bi any more than Nico could change being gay, but Jack had always been more passive about, well, everything – never quite wanted to go meet Nico’s friends, join that demonstration and speak out about stuff happing to people.
“And I– ” His voice cracks, and he stops, jaw tightening as if he’s ashamed of the crack. “I don’t.”
Jack’s heart pounds.
“Nico, I’m not – I’m not like them. You know that I don’t agree with those guys.”
Nico’s eyes glisten. “I don’t care if you think you’re not like them. I care that you thought it was an honour to meet Donald fucking Trump. I care that you didn’t even hesitate to laugh. I care that you did not anticipate it being a problem for me.”
“I didn’t think– ”
“I know, you never fucking think, Jack. I don’t believe you even know how to think for yourself for once.”
The words land like a slap. Jack stares at him, stunned. Nico’s face twists, something raw finally breaking through the carefulness. Tears stream down his flushed face.
“I need you to understand what it feels like,” he presses out between sobs. “To watch the person you love laugh like that and realize he doesn’t care. Doesn’t see. Doesn’t even want to.”
Jack shakes his head, pleading. “That’s not true. I want to. Tell me. Teach me. I’ll– ”
Nico’s laugh is small and bitter. “That’s not my job,” he whispers.
Jack’s throat burns. “But I love you.”
Nico closes his eyes. When he opens them, something in him is gone.
“I love you too,” he says. “That’s why this hurts so much. But love isn’t a permission slip.”
Jack steps forward again, helpless. “What are you saying?”
Nico’s mouth trembles. He swallows it down.
“I’m saying,” he says it like a threat, “that I can’t be with someone who calls my pain ‘not that deep.’ I can’t be with someone who thinks misplaced pride in a failing country, his own fucking ego, is more important than people.”
Jack’s breath comes in fast. “It’s not more important. I didn’t– I didn’t understand.”
Nico nods once, as if acknowledging a fact.
“And you should have,”
Jack’s eyes flood.
“I’ll try now,” he whispers.
Nico watches him, and for a second, there is something unbearably tender in his expression – like he is seeing the man he fell in love with, the boy who used to pull him close and say I’ve got you. Then the tenderness folds in on itself, exhausted.
“You’re only willing to try now,” Nico says, “because you’re scared of losing something.”
Jack flinches. Nico continues, voice shaking just slightly: “You didn’t try when it mattered, Jack.”
Silence falls between them. A car passes on the street, tires hissing on slush. Jack’s medal glints under the streetlight, bright and obscene. He reaches up and pulls it off his neck with shaking fingers. He holds it out like an offering.
“Take it,” he says hoarsely. “I don’t want it if – if it cost me you.”
Nico looks at the medal. Then he looks at Jack. And he says, so quietly Jack almost doesn’t hear it: “It didn’t cost you me.”
Jack’s brow furrows, confused. Nico’s eyes shine. “You gave me away,” he says.
Jack’s face crumples. Nico steps backward toward the door. Jack makes a sound – half sob, half protest – and reaches out, but he doesn’t touch him. He can’t, feels rooted to the spot. Nico’s hand finds the doorknob. He pauses, just for a breath, and Jack thinks – stupidly, desperately – that this is the moment where everything can still be undone.
But Nico doesn’t turn back.
“I hope you become someone you can live with,” he says. And then, like an act of mercy, he adds: “I hope you become someone I would have been proud to love.”
The door closes. The sound is not loud. But it echoes in Jack’s body like a gunshot.
☂︎
Jack spirals in ways that look, from the outside, like intensity. He plays better. He plays worse. He gets interviewed and says the wrong thing and watches headlines twist it. He gets trained by PR teams like a dog learning not to bite. At night, he sits alone in the apartment that still smells faintly like Nico’s soap and scrolls until his eyes ache.
When all else fails, he reads. That’s the beginning of it. He tries to remember all the books Nico spoke about so fondly that he rolled his eyes at. It is a slow, humiliating education of realizing how much he didn’t know because he never had to.
He learns that his laughter was a choice. He learns that silence can be violence dressed as dismissal. He learns that patriotism is a weapon to bludgeon people who were never invited to the table.
He thinks about the locker room constantly. He thinks about the way he laughed. It haunts him. He thinks about Nico watching. He tries to imagine the feeling – being warm and safe in your own home, and then watching the person you love invite something ugly inside with a bloody grin.
He tries to imagine it, and he can’t fully, and that inability makes him sick. He ends lifelong friendships. He has a falling out with Quinn and Luke. He makes himself so incredibly lonely that he cries on the phone with his mother, apologizing over and over again before he realises that he doesn’t deserve the absolution she readily tries to give. He starts going to therapy. It helps a bit. He writes messages he never sends.
I’m sorry.
I didn’t know.
I know now.
Please.
Help me.
I love you.
I miss you.
He keeps the medal in a drawer, wrapped in a sock like it’s something shameful. Gold. Heavy. Useless.
Time does what it always does: it moves. It doesn’t heal everything. It doesn’t fix. It just creates distance, like ice forming over a pond. Nico moves cities. Nico changes teams. A few months later, Nico comes out fully, publicly, in a way that feels like breathing after years underwater. The announcement is simple. There are no grand speeches, just a quiet refusal to keep pretending.
It ends his career and he leaves the NHL, joining a European team. Jack doesn’t think he has every cried so much as he did in the following months.
People talk. Then they move on. The world is awful like that – cruel and bored.
But Nico keeps living. He meets someone at an event back in Switzerland that has nothing to do with hockey. Someone who doesn’t look at him like a trophy, or a secret, or a risk. Someone who looks at him like he is simply a person worth loving. They build a life that is not loud.They adopt a dog. They argue about paint colors. They hold hands in grocery stores. Nico stops flinching when the doorbell rings. He stops bracing for backlash. He starts sleeping through the night.
Jack changes too. He becomes quieter in interviews. He gets involved in causes without announcing them like a brand strategy. He learns to shut up. He learns to listen. He apologizes to people he hurt – privately, sincerely, without asking for forgiveness as payment. It makes him a better man. It does not make him a better man for Nico, because Nico is not waiting at the end of Jack’s self-improvement like a prize. That is the lesson Jack learns last. And it is the cruelest.
☂︎
Four years after the gold medal, Jack plays a game on Olympic ice again. It’s a qualification-round game. Nothing historic. The arena is loud anyway. During warmups, Jack skates circles with the puck and feels the old instinctive electricity of being watched. He can sense it, the way a predator senses eyes.
He looks up, scanning the seats. And then he sees him. Nico is in a cute cozy looking sweater. Not alone. A man sits beside him, shoulder pressed to Nico’s. Their hands are intertwined on the ledge, fingers laced casually, unconcerned with who might see. Nico’s face, still so incredibly beautiful and sweet, is lit by the soft glow of the arena lights. He is smiling, dimples on full display – not the careful, defensive smile he used to wear when cameras were near, but something open and unguarded. The smile he wore at home.
Jack’s throat closes. He stands on the ice, surrounded by noise, and suddenly feels like he’s underwater and drowning. He thinks, absurdly, of that night years ago – Nico watching a video on a phone, the apartment quiet, the laughter on screen.
He thinks: If I could go back –
But there is no going back. There is only the ache of what you chose when you didn’t want to know it was a choice. Jack’s eyes burn. He blinks hard and forces himself to look away.
The puck drops.
The game begins.
Jack plays, because that is what he has always done: he turns pain into motion, turns loss into speed. He scores once. The crowd roars. He should feel triumphant. He feels nothing. Between periods, his phone buzzes in his locker – an old instinct, an old ghost, the memory of Nico’s name on his screen.
It’s just a team notification. He sits on the bench and stares at his gloves until the screen goes dark.
After the game, he doesn’t go to the bar with the team. He drives home alone through streets glittering with late-winter frost. His apartment is quiet, too clean, too empty. He opens the drawer where he keeps the medal. The sock is still there. He takes the medal out and lets it rest in his palm. Gold. It catches the light and looks beautiful. He hates it for that. He thinks of Nico’s voice – soft, steady, devastating: You gave me away.
Jack presses the medal against his chest, hard enough that it hurts, as if pain is proof that he’s learned something. He whispers into the empty room: “I’m sorry.”
No one answers. He tries again, louder, like maybe volume will make forgiveness appear:
“I’m sorry.”
Still nothing. Of course. Because apologies are not spells. They do not undo. They do not reverse. They do not resurrect what you killed with carelessness. Jack sits on the floor with his back against the cabinet, medal in his hand, and feels the full weight of it – not the metal, but what it represents. A victory. A choice. A laugh. A door closing. Somewhere across the city, Nico is probably asleep beside someone who loves him out loud. Someone who didn’t need to lose him to want to learn how to truly hold him and love him. Jack closes his eyes. And in the dark, the only thing he has left is the truth: He did become better. He did learn. He did change.
And it didn’t matter for the person he loved most. Because the cost of being late to learn is that you don’t get to take back what you did, to undo who you hurt. You only get to live with it.