Chapter Text
First and foremost, Janis is a hockey player. Her side gig is social media, even though it makes her basically zero dollars monthly. That being said, she chronicles her life as a newly minted professional hockey player as anyone whose second job is social media:
“First day on the job,” the Janis in the mirror says, lifting her toothbrush to her mouth with the hand not occupied by her phone. The video cuts to her spitting her toothpaste out and doing her minimal skincare (putting sunscreen on even if she’s going to be inside all day), and then to her in the kitchen with her roommate.
“For breakfast today I've got two slices of cinnamon raisin toast with butter, yogurt with blueberries and chopped apples, plus water and orange black tea. What's for breakfast, Caddy?”
“I’ve got oatmeal with cinnamon and apple chunks,” Janis’s roommate says to the camera as it pans across the table to a mostly finished breakfast. Unlike Janis—who is still in her pajamas—Cady is wearing a blouse and slacks, half of her hair braided into a half-up-half-down style.
“Cads has school, I've got fitness testing, we’ll check in with her at the end of the day. Everyone say ‘have a good day, Caddy!’”
There's no chat, but the comments are half filled with people wishing Ms. Caddy a good day at school.
The video cuts to Janis in her bedroom.
“First impressions are important, right? So this is the fit for the first day of preseason,” Janis announces in front of a full length mirror. She’s wearing a purple suit that’s a little too big, her shoulder length hair pinned out of her face.
“You might argue the draft was my first impression, but I think this one’s more important.”
Consistent viewers will note that Janis’s draft day outfit included grey slacks tailored into high-waisted shorts, a Hawaiian shirt tucked into said shorts, a matching blazer, and her hair braided into her game day style: two boxer braids that almost reached her waist. It was certainly an impression.
The video cuts to Janis, in her purple suit, biking past the camera, a helmet and sunglasses on. Her hockey bag is precariously strapped to her body, her sticks awkwardly attached to the bright green bike with zip ties. After four years of biking her sticks and pads across campus, you’d expect Janis to have a better system, or maybe even a car. But instead she has enough zip ties to worry anyone she's actually a serial killer and very good balance. Circus music plays in the background.
Unbeknownst to the audience with how Janis has edited the video, her arrival to the training facility has been caught on camera by Toronto’s social media admin, Damian Hubbard.
Fully beknownst to anyone who follows the Sceptres on both ZikZok and Picstagram, Janis gets put on blast immediately for biking her whole life to training. That video, of Janis pulling up, locking her bike, and cutting the zip ties—all in her lavender suit—is captioned “questionable first impression, ‘Imi’ike.”
Unsurprisingly, Janis is one of the first people at the rink. Overestimating how much time it takes to get anywhere is Janis’s hidden talent.
Since she has an abundance of time, Janis sets up her locker perfectly. Photos of her friends from home, her Wisconsin teammates, and most importantly her parents find themselves at home on the back wall, her pads hung on hooks, an abundance of the custom tape she uses for the handle and knob (it has unflattering cut outs of herself printed on it; it was a gag gift for her birthday during her junior season after winning Frozen Four MVP, and then she played out of her mind the for at time she used it and it’s never not used anymore) stacked on the shelf, and her emergency clothes under her seat.
As a gift for each of her new teammates (aka a tradition she started in high school), Janis made custom stickers of each of their best game faces and is busy half peeling and sticking them to name plates when her captain walks in.
“Morning, cap,” Janis greets, not even nothing to disguise her tomfoolery.
“Good morning, Janis,” Blair Burnbull greets in return. “Blair is fine.”
“Sure, cap.”
Going back to her business, humming along to her throwback brit pop, Janis continues numerically, dangling unflattering stickers from lockers.
Ever the picture of innocence, Janis is sitting in her locker, both wired earbuds in, mentally preparing for her first day at work. It tricks absolutely no one, but she tries anyway. Informal introductions are made and stickers are exchanged (see Janis distributes her collection of stickers to the masses because everyone loves them so much).
And then Ryan Troy makes them do ice breakers.
“Hi, I’m Janis ‘Imi’ike-“
“Hi, Janis,” the whole team interrupts.
“She/her, I don’t really have any nicknames. My second favorite sport is water polo.”
The circle moves on. It’s all vaguely culty.
If there’s anything to be said about Janis ‘Imi’ike, it’s that she was heavily overshadowed by the rest of her draft class. When the most notable names, KJ Harley, Alaina Edwards, and Abby Murray, are Olympians, of course a two-way defender with two ankle injuries in three years is going to be overlooked. Specifically, it’s easy to overlook a Janis ‘Imi’ike who's on the same championship winning team as veritable stars KJ Harvey and Alaina Edwards.
Ryan Troy says as much in the press conference after the draft. He also says Toronto was lucky to catch her that late in the draft because a defender such as herself shouldn’t have been waiting that long. What he doesn’t say is that Toronto has no need for a defender.
What Ryan Troy doesn't know is that Janis will put in the most effort ever to get ice time. Janis is going to earn her ice time, dammit, exactly like she did at Wisconsin.
And that starts with fitness testing. She outlasts everyone in the beep test, accelerates on and off the ice at speeds nearly matching the famously and ironically speedy Renata Slow, and has a can do a box jump that's over half as tall as she is. Janis lifts heavy and lifts often, a sleeper build hidden under her purple suits and custom clothes.
Being paid to do anything is almost 80% meetings, so they wrap the day up with yet another meeting. They’ll hit the ice tomorrow, Ryan Troy promises.
Back in the locker room, Janis dawdles until it’s mostly cleared out, and she films her cool down routine. Filming herself is always a little awkward, but she comes across much better in her TikToks than in pressers.
“Got any expectations for the season, ‘Imi’ike?” Emma Baltais asks, her own phone in Janis’s face.
“Play good hockey, you know? Can’t set the bar too high if you want me to exceed expectations,” she jokes, rolling out her quads, looking like she's humping the floor on film.
“C’mon, you gotta have one goal. An attainable goal that you can achieve during your first season.”
Thinking for a moment, Janis declares “I wanna knock Marie Philippon on her ass and not get penalized.”
“Big words, going after Captain Clutch,” Natalie Forker says from her stall, slowly peeling her sweaty clothes off.
“Gotta beat the best to be the best, Forks. Good, clean hockey and a solid hit on Philippon. What more can a guy ask for?”
She hopes her charisma is working. She hopes that an audience of Victoire fans isn't going to take this and spin a villain narrative for her. This will get cut from the vlog. Emma goes around to interview their other teammates as Janis rolls out her calves.
“Post day one,” Janis says as she walks out of Ford Training Centre and to her bike, the purple suit once again on, “I’d say not bad. We haven’t hit the ice yet but just you wait! I’m gonna get myself home and maybe Caddy will be there, I dunno. I’m thinking chicken parm for dinner tonight, but I kind of have to go to the store since our fridge, for some reason, is basically empty. Fun fact, things haven’t changed that much since move-in since for some reason we’ve been focused on decorating rather than, you know, surviving.”
Biking and vlogging is not the smartest decision to make, but that will never stop her from biking and vlogging in the parking lot. The last couple people in the building are watching her travel from the front door to the driveway.
The aforementioned move in is the complementary ZikZok to her move out video from after graduation: a timelapse of unpacking boxes that accidentally turned into a fashion show as Janis remembers the articles of clothing she brought to Toronto. It spawned another video where Janis shows off her trinket collection, which includes a little wooden mushroom figurine that one of her friends from Wisconsin brought back from a trip to Switzerland, a metal model of the SR-71 Blackbird, and a bunch of lucky cats among other random bits and bobs that she’s been gifted or found throughout college. Her decor got its own video, where she displayed all her posters and funny postcards, string lights with more random bits clipped on, the yellow Christmas lights that hang around the ceiling, her prized lava lamp, the garland of origami cranes, and photos pinned up on the cork board next to her door.
Vlogging in public is always a choice, one Janis makes on the regular. This time, she's rambling about her dinner plans to her phone while standing in the produce section, debating what kind of vegetable she should make. This isn’t particularly interesting and most likely going to get cut, but it’s just the life of a wannabe social media influencer.
Once Janis has decided what to make for dinner, she finally makes it back to her new home, also filming her dinner.
“So, chicken seasoned and in the oven, pasta water boiling, blanching water boiling, I think we’re doing pretty well here, team. The beans will be easy: it’s a blanche, shock, and then sauté in sauce—by the way, I got this recipe from a restaurant at home in Chicago, Girl and the Goat. Absolute fire place, so if you’re in the area, you should definitely make a reservation. If Toronto ends up playing in Chicago this year, I’m so going to convince them to go there.
“Pasta is pasta, boil and then add some pasta water to the sauce. See, you do learn something from cooking shows. Shout out to Top Chef for teaching me how to cook, y’know?”
Cooking vlogs aren’t new for Janis, she almost exclusively hosted team dinners for Wisconsin, a tradition for the night before home games. Scroll down through her TikToks and you can find a video of her making something as boring as lasagna to something like a whole salmon fillet (plus reviews from her teammates).
Cady’s at work still, somehow, so Janis eats her dinner on the couch while watching an old Top Chef episode, her camera finally off.
Once again, Janis is one of the first players at Ford Training Centre, this time with no intention to prank anyone. With her phone connected to the locker room speaker, Janis goes through her activation for the ankle she sprained badly twice during college. Her ankle cracks as she spells out the alphabet with her toes.
One of the best warm ups she could possibly do (more for her mentality than her body) is dance along to the music currently blaring from the speaker. Janis has gone classic 2010s pop rock, which can really only lend itself to jumping and shouting the words to songs she wishes she could have listened to on Twisted Tour. She’s not paying attention to anything, certainly not Conners filming her from the doorway as she’s bouncing around and half shouting the lyrics to the songs she listened to in middle school.
When Conners and Baltais cut the music (Janis is not high enough on the totem pole to be the locker room DJ), Janis jumps out of her skin and probably five feet into the air. There’s no way that Janis’s screech isn’t going to be on Baltais’s TikTok. Janis retires to her locker with her earbuds in, relegated away from the speaker in favor of Copper on aux.
Lacing her skates, Janis finally gets to hit the ice. Growing up across the street from the rink in Oak Lawn, Janis was raised with skates on her feet and a stick in her hands. Neither of her parents are sports fans, but Janis fell in love long before she even knew what hockey was. In a fresh, white practice jersey with her last name stitched onto the back, Janis steps onto the fresh sheet of ice and takes a lap, taking it all in. For the first time, it really hits that she’s being paid to play hockey. She doesn’t have to navigate classes, a job, and a sport, it’s just hockey, all day, everyday.
Janis is careful to digest all the instructions, tips, and notes from her teammates and coaching staff, always eager to learn more. Just because she’s being paid now, Janis doesn’t change how she plays. During any sort of play simulation drill, Janis displays her hockey IQ through her positioning and the way she never stops communicating with her teammates. Despite the established D lines from last season, Janis’s introduction means that it’s time for a shake up. It’s just day one, so they try her with Condos. Like Condos, Janis is more of a shut down defender. While she’s more of a two-way defender than Condos, her style of play leans more shut down than two-way.
It’s a good pairing for Janis to work on her offensiveness. While Janis typically looks to distribute the puck, so does Condos. While they get used to each other during the scrimmage, Janis starts looking for zone entries. The opposing team isn’t forechecking that hard, so Janis flips the switch from looking to distribute to her forwards so they can enter the offensive zone, she starts carrying the puck in.
Having grown up playing as a winger and switching to defense during high school when asked, Janis knows how to get a defender to bite. It’s her signature move, but Jalmarsson has never played against Janis, so when she dangles the puck as if her stick handling is lacking, Jalmarsson moves to poke check her, and Janis takes off. With a swivel of her head, Janis identifies Forker at the open back door. Winding up like she’s going to unleash a slapshot on Milaina Chuli, she dishes the puck directly onto Forker’s tape and it just bounces off into the net.
Her line heads to the bench after the goal, and Janis gets a round of head pats as she shuffles down the bench.
The locker room is full of boisterous laughter as they all strip out of sweaters, pants, and pads. Distracted by the family group chat, Janis marinates in her shoulder pads and hockey pants while people slowly start to filter out. She responds to Milo’s complaints about his midterms by laughing, finally gloating that she’s free from the hellscape of midterms and finals, hearts the photo of Ezra’s dining hall lunch, and thanks her parents for the good luck messages that came in while she was on the ice.
In the group chat with just her brothers—they actually understand hockey, unlike their parents—Janis is typing out a brief recounting of training when Daryl Potts and Clair Walton plant themselves in stalls on either side of her.
“So, kid, we wanna take you out to dinner,” Clair declares.
“A proper welcome to Toronto,” Daryl continues.
“Given specially to you by the Toronto natives,” they chorus. The Sceptres are definitely a cult.
“Only as long as you’re paying for me,” Janis bargains, batting her eyelashes jokingly. “I haven’t been paid yet.”
“Oh, obvs, Jan—gross, we’re not calling you ‘Jan’—we’d never make a rookie pay for their own food when we’re taking them out.”
“There’s no good way to shorten my name,” Janis confesses, always a little down about the fact that her name can’t be shortened to a fun nickname. “I got called Jaundice at Wisconsin for a while, though, because once I wore a yellow shirt to practice and I apparently looked like I had liver problems.”
Potts laughs, elated at this discovery.
“Okay, Jaundice. Go home, shower and stuff, and then I’ll pick you up at, say, six?”
“Bro, we can’t call the rookie Jaundice,” Clair groans. “Calling anyone a medical condition isn’t funny.”
“Party pooper.”
“I’m fine with being called Jaundice,” Janis says at the same time.
“No, we’re not calling you Jaundice,” Clair shuts down before Daryl can argue.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find you a nickname,” Potts winks.
As if being from Toronto gives them some sort of natural connection, Potts and Walton stand up and walk back to their own stalls to gather their own stuff and leave.
Janis turns back to her phone to finish her message about training to her brothers, now adding that some of the vets are going to take her out for food.
Off the ice, Janis is also desperate to make a good first impression. For the sake of her social life, Janis needs this to go well. Potts takes longer than expected to get to Janis’s apartment, finding Janis sitting on the curb, fiddling with the hem of her oversized t-shirt. There’s a stain on her jeans that she didn’t put there on purpose and a loose string dangling from the hem of the long sleeve shirt she layered under her tee. She feels like she’s back in high school, before she learned how to drive, waiting outside her school for her mom to pick her up.
Potts and Walton take Janis to a shawarma place. Her falafel shawarma comes in a small plastic basket, wrapped in red checkered paper, and the scent of the seasoning wafts up.
“So, tell us about yourself. You’re kinda an enigma since you’re practically invisible compared to Edwards and Harley.”
“Well, uh, I’m from basically Chicago, I’ve been playing hockey since forever, and I, for some reason, really like learning about academic fraud.”
“What’s ‘basically Chicago?’” Walton asks, picking at her rice bowl.
“Oak Lawn is a suburb in southwest Chicago, but people that care about shit will say ‘oh, that’s not Chicago, that’s not actually in the city’ like some pretentious asshole. I’m from Chicago in the same way that Copper is from Chicago, just from the south, not the north.”
“Are you a Blackhawks fan, then?”
“Not gonna lie, Daryl, I don’t watch the NHL. You couldn’t pay me to watch men’s sports.”
Her comment gets laughs out of her teammates.
“I’m really bad at watching sports since I get too stressed out.”
“Wait, then how do you play hockey if you get too stressed out by watching it?”
“Being on the ice is different than watching it. I’m in control of things on the ice. I can change the game from there. If I’m watching a game on TV, everything’s out of my control even though I think I can see other options.”
“Oh, so we have yet another control freak.”
“Fuck off. I’m not that much of a control freak.”
“Babe,” Clair laughs, “you literally just said that you can’t watch sports because you get stressed over not being able to control what’s happening on the ice.”
“Well, when you spend four years quarterbacking the powerplay, you try to convince people that you’re not a control freak.”
“Did you play anything else?” Daryl asks, derailing the conversation.
“Sport wise, I grew up playing softball and I played rugby for a bit when I was in high school. Plus some other random ones, like I ran track for a single season in high school because a girl I liked was on the team but nothing happened there and I hate running so I quit. I played soccer as a kid since I was a kid in the 2010s. Position wise, I used to be a winger. I got switched to a defender in high school because we had too many forwards and not enough defenders, and then stuck with it.”
“No fucking way. You got fucking drafted to defense?”
“I volunteered, but yeah.”
Janis isn’t the most social person. She was never particularly close with any of her teammates at Wisconsin, and she’s not the best at making friends. Having dinner with her new teammates is really nice. You’d be surprised that wannabe influencer Janis ‘Imi’ike isn’t very social (honestly, the TikTok account started as a way for Janis to keep her parents updated with her life).
Cady’s at home when Janis gets dropped off by Potts, finally back from school since she’s obsessed with never bringing grading home.
“How was dinner?”
“Fun. I dunno, felt a little like an interrogation. I didn’t expect professional sports to be a cult,” Janis grumbles.
“You signed up for it. And it’s Canada, what did you expect? We love our hockey, ‘specially in the GTA.”
“You’re not even from Toronto, dude.”
“Point still stands. Canadians love their hockey.”