Work Text:
Will doesn’t know how long he sits on the edge of the springy hotel bed in the dark before he finally hears a knock at the door. Time has felt wobbly and fake since the middle of the game, passing extra-slowly on the bench while his ice time slipped through clumsy, gloved fingers. The locker room was equally confusing, with a few guys attempting to make plans to go out and celebrate and Will desperately trying to figure out how to magnanimously get out of it until Toff read the room and waved them off. At least, Will thinks that’s what happened. He was mostly focused on controlling his breathing, keeping a neutral expression, and cleaning up as quickly as possible without seeming like he was rushing.
The original plan had been to go out after the game, although everyone was waiting on Will to decide where. He was supposed to let the team ply him with drinks, even though he’s been legal in Canada for years already. He was supposed to sneak a dessert that isn’t on the meal plan, because it’s his birthday. He was supposed to find a nice girl to take back to the single room that the team rigged for him at the hotel “as a gift”, as if half of them weren’t fully aware that it would go unused, even if he had been in the mood for celebrating.
Hence the knock.
Mack doesn’t wait for an invitation, pushing the door open and closing it gently behind him, sliding the deadbolt and security bar into place slowly and carefully. They exchanged extra keys as soon as they got them down in the lobby earlier. Will kind of wishes that they hadn’t so he could have a breakdown in peace, rather than in front of his teammate-best-friend-occasional-hookup-that-he’s-in-love-with.
Mack doesn’t turn around for a long moment. His shoulders are tense, making his frame seem bigger than usual. Will really doesn’t have it in him to manage emotions for him tonight.
“Hey,” Mack says eventually, finally bringing himself to face Will. His voice cuts through the silence like an arrow, interrupting the low hum of the heater in the darkness. He’s already in sweats and his sleep shirt that he’ll inevitably kick off if he stays because Will keeps the room warmer than he likes it. Will doesn’t know if he wants to melt into him or shove him back out the door.
“Hey,” he replies. It takes two tries to get the word out. Mack looks at him for a long moment, lips pressed firmly together, and Will wonders what he sees that’s making him hesitate so long rather than immediately flop down next to Will or on top of him like usual.
“You okay?” Mack eventually asks. The look Will gives him is withering.
“I got benched on my fucking birthday.”
Mack nods once.
“Right, yeah. That was bullshit.”
Just as suddenly as it had appeared, all of the anger leaves Will, dumped out with Mack’s words. Even while it had been happening in the rink, anger took a backseat to a sickening disappointment and resignation, and Mack’s words are all that it takes for that horrible, hollow feeling in his chest to come back.
Because it isn’t bullshit, not really. Will has been playing like shit lately, and everyone knows it. He’s been pointless for the last four games, with only two assists in the last seven. He can feel it himself when he’s out on the ice: the way things haven’t been connecting right, how he always seems half a step behind, everything a bit too slow and hesitant.
He’s in his head, and he knows it. Knowing about the problem and fixing it are two different things.
“I’m just trying to get someone to play with Mack,” Warso had said to the media to explain moving Will down. “You’re not playing at his level, Smith. Get your fucking act together,” he had said to Will directly. It wasn’t anything that Will didn’t already know, but it felt like being cut open with half the team looking away awkwardly and pretending they couldn’t hear.
Thirteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds. His second-lowest ice time of this season, and nothing to show for it.
“Smitty?” Mack asks. Will shakes his head trying to dispel all of his thoughts. It’s no use dwelling on things he can’t change. Keep moving forward, right? That’s what everyone always says. He can’t get caught up thinking about a time when he was actually good at hockey or dwelling on the plays he’s tried that fizzled out with no stats to show for it. He’s supposed to just go out there and perform, as easy as that. No excuses.
“Sorry,” he says. “Hey.”
Mack frowns, brow crinkling in a way that Will always wants to reflexively smooth over. He tries to replay their conversation in his head, wondering where he misstepped to cause that expression on him.
“Hey,” Mack says cautiously, and–oh. That’s it. They already did this part. Will is repeating the script, and that’s weirding Mack out.
He needs to get it together.
“You going to stand there all night, or are you going to sit down?” he says, trying to infuse as much teasing into it as he can, the type of affection-flirting-chirping that he can’t help but use with Mack, even if he isn’t feeling it tonight. Mack shuffles next to him and sits down too close, their hips and thighs and knees bumping. Will’s leg burns the way it does after a hard shift, when he’s pushed himself as far as he can go but not far enough to win. Mack has to lean back so he doesn’t shoulder Will out of the way, and Will wants to shove him off the bed but can’t imagine ever bringing himself to do so, not when Mack might accurately read the action and leave because of it.
They’re quiet for long enough for Will to feel awkward, and he knows that he needs to say something so Mack doesn’t get even more weirded out and actually think something is wrong, but he can’t figure out what to say. Normally they’d either go over the game so Mack can sort it in his head or get right down to business so they both can get a release, except any thoughts of the game make him want to throw up and he honestly doesn’t know if he’ll be able to get it up tonight.
What is wrong with him? He’s gotten called out for playing shitty before, and usually it makes him play better. It’s no secret that Warso has high expectations for him and isn’t shy about letting him know when he isn’t meeting them. He’s used to this. He doesn’t know why this time feels so much worse.
“What–what do you need?” Mack asks. His hand gently squeezes Will’s knee, another point of contact that Will can’t decide if he wants to lean into or run away from. “I don’t–you’re always so good about knowing how to make me feel better, but I don’t know. I don’t know what will help right now. I need you to tell me.”
Will shakes his head.
“I’m fine, Mack.”
“Will–”
“Seriously,” he says, standing and crossing to the window so he doesn’t do something catastrophic like scream or burst into tears. The blinds are drawn so he doesn’t have to look out over this stupid city, but at least it creates some distance between them. “I’m fine.”
“Then why aren’t we out celebrating?” Mack asks.
Will snorts.
“Celebrating what? We lost. I played like shit.”
“Your birthday, Will.”
A hand lands on his shoulder and Will doesn’t catch his flinch in time. He hadn’t heard Mack move.
“Dude,” Mack says. No follow up.
“It’s fine,” Will says, shrugging him off. “I can choose if I want to go out for my own birthday, and I don’t this time. I’m tired. I don’t want to celebrate right now.”
“Okay,” Mack says quietly. “Okay. What do you want to do, then? We could watch a movie. I can order milk and cookies, if you want them.”
Just like that, Will can see a different version of tonight, one where both of them scored and the Sharks won. They’d go out with the team and Will would flirt with some random girl to keep up appearances while eyeing Mack the entire time, then he’d laugh good-naturedly while letting things fizzle and tell the team she just wasn’t feeling it, giggling enough to show that he wasn’t hurt about it. By that time it’d be late enough that Mack would make their excuses for them, and Will might pretend to be a bit drunker than he actually would be so he could lean on Mack more. They’d spill out of an Uber and into Will’s room in a tangle of limbs, and Mack would kiss him and Will would feel on top of the world, and then he’d pull back and he would be the one asking if they could order milk and cookies, and maybe Mack’s face would split into that fond smile that he sometimes has that makes Will think that maybe, just maybe–
Just as soon as the vision arrives it dissipates, slipping away like smoke in the air.
Mack makes a weird, wounded noise. His thumb brushes Will’s cheek, and he’s absolutely mortified to realize that he’s wiping away a tear.
“Sorry,” he says, turning away.
“Will–” Mack repeats, grabbing his shoulder and not letting go this time. Will turns further away, trying to hide his face in his shoulder like an idiot, as if that would stop Mack.
“Sorry,” he repeats, voice thick with tears while a few more of them escape his eyes unbidden. Mack forcibly turns him with another one of those wounded noises, bullying his way into Will’s space like he always does, one arm around Will’s back and the other reaching up to cradle the back of Will’s head until he relents and burrows his face in Mack’s shoulder. Maybe he can still hide from Mack if he just gets close enough.
Tears continue to flow from his eyes. They’re going to get all over Mack’s shirt.
“Shh,” Mack says, rubbing up and down his spine in long, slow strokes. He has rough hockey hands, pressing hard against Will like he can compress all of the hurt he’s carrying into a small enough patch that he can extract it. Will’s muscles protest until the hand in his hair moves to the back of his neck and squeezes, and Will gives up the battle. Mack is strong enough to hold him up, even as exhausted as he is, so Will wraps his arms around him and lets go. Large, aching sobs wrack his body while Mack tries to comfort him through it, murmuring small reassurances and making soothing noises that Will can feel in his ribcage from how close they’re pressed. Will hates that he’s seeing him like this when he usually keeps it together so well around him, but he can’t help it. He doesn’t know how to stop now that he’s started. He doesn’t know if he ever will.
“Baby, please,” Mack begs around gentle platitudes. “You need to breathe. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
Will cries harder, if that’s possible.
They don’t do that. Will is pretty consistent with just calling Mack by his name, and while Mack gets more creative he still sticks to locker room nicknames that the full team cycles through. Will let “sweetheart” slip out once while they were hooking up and Mack got weird and distant after. Will thought he had irreparably fucked up until Mack bounded up to him the next day and carried on as if nothing happened. Since then, any pet names have stayed firmly locked behind his teeth.
Now, though, it’s like the floodgates have been opened. Mack peppers Will with other affectionate names as he tries to sooth him, soft “you’re okay, honey, I’ve got you”s and “I’m here sweetheart”s and “we’ll get through this, baby, it’ll all be okay”s joining his other comforting murmurs. Will clings to him like his life depends on it, fingers aching where they’re stretching Mack’s shirt and his chest spasming with harsh, pathetic sobs.
Eventually, Mack guides them to the bed, leaning against the headboard and pulling Will against him. Will’s crying has slowed down enough for his face to burn with humiliation, but not enough to fully stop, sniffles and tears leaking out and dampening Mack’s shoulder. Mack’s fingers card through his hair, carefully bypassing any tangles he encounters.
“Sorry,” Will croaks eventually. Mack hushes him again, then places a devastating kiss on the top of his head. Will tries to extract himself, but Mack’s arm tightens around him, and Will is far too exhausted to fight.
“You’re fine,” Mack says, continuing to comb through Will’s hair. Will’s eyelashes stick together when he blinks, and Mack’s shirt is damp under him. Will probably ruined it.
He can’t stop fucking up lately.
“Sorry,” he repeats.
“Stop it,” Mack says, tugging on the end of his hair. The sharp pain cuts through a bit of the fog clouding behind Will’s eyes. “The apologies are freaking me out more than the crying. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I’m letting the team down.”
“Bullshit,” Mack spits. “You’re the second-highest point scorer on the team even though you were out on injury for ten games, and you’re still one of our best skaters even when you’re in a slump. Warso was wrong to bench you tonight, especially in front of everyone.”
“He’s the coach,” Will says.
“It was bullshit and everyone knows it,” Mack replies with no room for argument.
Will lets out a heavy breath. Mack gets this way sometimes. He’s fine nitpicking his own flaws with Will and an iPad, spending long minutes on the phone with his dad nodding and promising to be better, or talking through strategies and disparities quietly with the coaching team, but his hackles raise if someone calls out either of them publicly, even when it’s deserved. The coaching team learned early on last year that singling Mack out for criticism is a sure way to lose rapport with him and earn a cold shoulder. He’s such a brat, but he can get away with it because he’s Macklin Celebrini: first overall, generational talent, Olympic medalist, best player that the Sharks have by a wide margin.
Will does not have that luxury. He isn’t untouchable, not the way that Mack is. Mack would never get sent down to fourth line, no matter how badly he was playing. Even when he wasn’t being compared to him, Will wasn’t enough of a standout to excuse any sort of special treatment, and he never thought it would be deserved. Mack doesn’t, either, but sometimes he doesn’t see the ways that the franchise makes room for him. He doesn’t see that there are things he gets away with that Will gets punished for. It was stupid to think that they’d keep them together when Mack is so clearly the star and Will is just a satellite in his orbit.
It isn’t Mack’s fault. He works harder than anyone Will knows, loves the game more than any other player, is always as humble as he can be without being performative, and always attributes successes to the entire team. Will has made his peace with playing second-fiddle to him, and for the most part he can beat back the green-eyed monster that rears its head when anyone talks up Macklin while dismissing the work from him or Toff or Ekky or Wenny.
He handled his feelings when Mack got called to the Olympics and absolutely flourished there without him. He was the perfect supportive friend during every cross-timezone phone call, picture of a meal that Mack wanted to show him so they could find an equivalent back home, and text analysis of every game because Mack knew without asking that Will always watched them, even when he had to set weird alarms and switch his sleep schedule. He let the media pepper him with relentless questions about someone else and he read all of the articles about how amazing Macklin Celebrini is and tried to believe him when he said that he missed sharing the ice with Will even though he was playing on a line with McDavid and MacKinnon.
Mack doesn’t know that when Jack fucking Hughes scored that game-winning goal, Will felt a horrible, all-encompassing sense of relief that had nothing to do with national pride. He hated himself for it in the next second, but the memory of it has been bitter in the back of his throat since Mack returned.
Instead of confessing to any of that, Will stays curled up against Mack’s side, letting the steady scratch of blunt nails against his scalp soothe him until he finally runs out of tears. Mack is uncharacteristically quiet through it, his steady, deep breathes and the hum of the hotel heating system the only soundtracks to the end of Will’s breakdown. By the time his eyes have dried out, he’s too tired to feel the shame that he knows will overtake him tomorrow.
“Better?” Mack asks eventually, his own voice scratchy from disuse. Will hums and tries to burrow further into Mack’s gross, damp shoulder.
“It’s okay, Smitty,” Mack continues with another gentle tug at his hair. “You were overdue for a crashout. God knows you’ve talked me through enough of them, and I know things have been shitty for you lately.”
Will wants to protest, because there’s been a lot of good stuff, lately, too. He got to visit home and BC again. It’s been almost a month since the Olympics ended, and it’s been great to have the full team together. While he hasn’t quite snapped back to it with Mack on the ice, they’ve been closer than ever off of it. When Will pressed Mack against his mattress after picking him up from the airport and Mack said “I’ve missed you so fucking much,” Will thought he was going to explode from happiness.
But it’s been hard, too. And maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe Will needs to suck it up and just deal with it the way everyone else does.
It feels nice, though, to have released it all. He’ll regret it tomorrow when he has to be seen by Mack in the light of day, but right now he feels like someone scooped out his chest and rinsed the cavity with warm water. He doesn’t have the capacity to panic or be upset, only to lay here and let Mack keep doing whatever the fuck he wants, just like usual.
“You should go wash your face and drink some water,” Mack says quietly against the top of his head. Will grumbles. “Fine. Get a headache from dehydration and wake up with snot on your face. See if I care.”
Mack jostles his shoulder anyway, and manages to coax Will to unsteady feet and shuffle him towards the bathroom. He splashes water on his face without meeting his eyes in the mirror, then follows the rest of Mack’s advice and drinks some water out of his cupped hands. He feels marginally more like a person than a discarded peanut shell after, which counts for something.
By the time he pads back out to the bedroom, Mack has changed into one of his shirts and has arranged the pillows against the headboard to more comfortably prop himself up. He’s flipping through channels with the volume on low until he lands on something that he likes, the glow of the TV illuminating his face in blue and white shadows. Will glances at the screen and thinks he recognizes a romcom that they’ve already watched, but he’s too exhausted to be sure.
“Come on,” Mack says, patting the bed next to him once he spots Will lingering in the doorway of his own hotel room like a creeper. Will hesitates, because they don’t really share beds, either, not without…
“I’m not up for anything, tonight,” he says.
“Yeah, no shit,” Mack replies. “I figured you’d either jump me immediately or we weren’t going to do anything. Get over here.”
His feet move without any input from his brain, and he slides under the covers next to Mack. He tries to prop himself up and angle towards the tv, but Mack makes a disgruntled noise and tugs him back down, arranging Will until he’s wrapped around him again, head against his chest, one of Will’s legs hitched over his hip. One more kiss to the top of his head finally gets Will to settle, and his next exhale releases all of the tension from his body, sinking into Mack like he’s underwater.
“Sleep, Smit,” Mack murmurs. “Tomorrow is a rest day, then we’ll get back to it and things will be better. We’ll show them.”
Will hums. The white noise of the tv washes over him with Mack’s breathing, and he lets his eyes slip closed.
“Mack?” he asks after a few minutes, voice heavy and drowsy.
“Yeah?” Mack asks. “What do you need?”
You, he doesn’t answer, because he has dignity and as much of Mack as he can right now.
“This was a really shitty birthday.”
Mack snorts.
“Yeah. This was just the practice run. We’ll actually celebrate later at home. Maybe next week. Give you the best twenty-first birthday ever.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” Will hums.
“Yes it does,” Mack says, as if the universe will bend to his will just because he wants it to. It probably will, knowing him.
Will hums again and burrows closer. Mack’s hand reaches down to squeeze his thigh, then returns to his spot tangled in Will’s hair.
“Sleep, Will,” Mack whispers. “I’ve got you.”
Will closes his eyes and sleeps.