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The hotel room was quiet.
Nate lay on the bed in Dallas—some Marriott or Hilton or whatever the road schedule had thrown at them this time—freshly showered, hair dripping onto the pillow he hadn't bothered to protect with a towel, scrolling through his phone with the single-minded focus of a man trying very hard to outrun his own thoughts.
They'd won. 2-0 against Dallas. Shutout. Clean, efficient, disciplined hockey from puck drop to final buzzer. Wedgewood had been a wall. The defensive structure had held. And Nate had sealed it himself—last minute in the third, an empty-net goal. Not flashy, not complicated. Just instinct, timing, and certainty. The kind of play that didn’t need a highlight reel to matter. Two points in the standings. Clinching math tightening in their favor. Everything going exactly according to plan.
And yet.
There was a noise in his head that wouldn't stop. A low, persistent hum beneath the surface of every thought—not enough, not fast enough, not good enough—that he recognized from years of living with it and still couldn't silence. The regular season was winding down. The playoffs were approaching with the inevitability of a rising tide, and Nate could feel their weight pressing against his chest like a tightening band: the expectations, the narratives, the suffocating awareness that everything he'd done in the regular season would be measured against what happened in the postseason and found wanting if the results didn't match.
He knew the thoughts were irrational. Knew that a 2-0 shutout against a division rival was objectively good. Knew that his point totals and his metrics and his underlying numbers all pointed to a season that was, by any reasonable standard, excellent. But the thoughts didn't operate on reason. They operated on the specific, corrosive frequency of a man who had been told—by media, by fans, by the insidious voice in his own skull—that excellence wasn't enough. That anything short of a championship was failure. That he would always be measured against the man in Edmonton, and would always fall one inch short.
He pushed the thought away. Kept scrolling.
The Pens game had finished a couple hours before his own—Pittsburgh 9, Florida 4. Nate had caught the final score on the arena monitors during the second intermission and felt a bright, instinctive spark of happiness that he'd tamped down before anyone on the bench could notice. Nine goals. Against a Panthers team that had been to two consecutive Cup Finals. In a season where Pittsburgh had no business being as competitive as they were, with their aging core and their patchwork roster and their franchise goaltender retired and their captain returning from an injury that should have ended lesser careers.
But Sidney Crosby was not a lesser career. Sidney Crosby was a force of nature wearing a C on his chest, and the Pens' resurgence this season was, in large part, the direct result of one man refusing to accept the reality that everyone else had accepted on his behalf.
The recaps confirmed what Nate already knew: Sid had surpassed Steve Yzerman tonight for the seventh-most points in NHL history. Another milestone. Another name crossed off the list that separated Sid from Gretzky at the summit. The headlines were already proliferating—Crosby passes Yzerman, 87 continues historic climb, The Kid shows no signs of slowing down—accompanied by stats and graphics and comparison charts that Sid would pretend not to have seen and would secretly study in detail on his next flight.
Geno had a hat trick. Three goals, all in the last two periods, the first one a tip-in from the right circle that Nate watched twice because the release was genuinely beautiful. At thirty-eight, with a hand injury two weeks behind him and a body that had absorbed more punishment than most cars, Evgeni Malkin was still capable of performances that reminded everyone why he'd been a generational talent. The man was absurd.
Nate kept scrolling. The postgame coverage was extensive—nine goals generated a lot of content—and somewhere between the box score analysis and the advanced stats breakdown, he found the photo.
The Penguins' locker room, postgame. The whole team, still in their gear, surrounding Sid and Geno for the milestone celebration. Sticks raised, smiles wide, the particular energy of a group that had just put nine past a former Cup finalist radiating from every face. Sid was at the center, his helmet off and his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, grinning that wide, crinkle-eyed grin that made him look ten years younger.
And there, right beside him—Geno on his left, arm slung over Sid's shoulders. Nikita in front, Geno's son, tucked between Sid and his father with the easy comfort of a kid who'd grown up in this locker room, who'd been carried on these shoulders and passed between these hands since he was old enough to hold a stick. The three of them—Sid, Geno, Nikita—were the natural center of the frame. The focal point. The obvious trio.
Nate's thumb hovered over the photo. He looked at it for longer than he should have.
He scrolled down.
Of course someone had cropped it. Multiple people, actually. Fan accounts, hockey Twitter, the usual aggregators who lived for this content. The cropped version showed just the three of them—Sid, Geno, Nikita—isolated from the team, the image tightened to emphasize their proximity. Geno's arm behind Sid’s back. Nikita between them. Sid's hand resting on Nikita's head.
The captions varied but circled the same theme:
the holy trinity
this is what family looks like
uncle sid and the malkins my heart cannot take this
they really are the cutest hockey family in the league and it's not even close
Nate closed the photo. Opened it again. Closed it again.
He was being ridiculous. He knew he was being ridiculous. Geno was his friend—had been his friend for years, one of the few people in the league whose company Nate genuinely enjoyed outside of hockey contexts. Nikita was a great kid. The bond between Sid and the Malkin family was deep and genuine and predated Nate's relationship with Sid by nearly two decades. There was nothing threatening about it. Nothing to be jealous of. The rational part of Nate's brain—the part that sat with his sports psychologist every two weeks and practiced cognitive reframing and breathwork—understood this completely.
The irrational part of his brain looked at that photo and felt something hot and ugly curl in his stomach.
Because here's what the rational part couldn't fully neutralize: the public perception. The narrative. The way the hockey internet saw Sid-and-Geno as an institution—twenty years of shared history, shared triumphs, shared language, an on-ice partnership that had generated more combined points than most franchises produced in a decade. They were inseparable in the cultural imagination. A package deal. And the affection between them—visible, demonstrative, completely unguarded—was treated by fans and media alike as something sacred. Something deep. Something real.
And Nate?
Nate was the outsider. The admirer. The younger star who'd grown up idolizing Sid and now orbited his world with an eagerness that the internet found alternately endearing and pathetic. Crosby’s fanboy.The comments appeared under every interaction—every shared All-Star weekend, every Team Canada camp, every postgame handshake that lasted half a second too long. And while some fans found it charming, others were less kind. Lovesick puppy. Sucking up to the GOAT. Surface-level clout chasing.As if Nate's admiration for Sid—which was real, which had been real since he was fourteen years old watching Sid play on television—was somehow lesser than what Geno and Sid shared. Shallower. More performative.
Nobody knew what happened behind closed doors. Nobody knew about the late-night calls, the secret visits, the way Sid's voice went soft and private when he said Nate's name. Nobody knew that Nate had mapped every freckle on Sid's shoulders, that he knew the exact pitch of Sid's laugh when he was genuinely happy versus performing happiness. That he'd held Sid through panic attacks at 3 AM and whispered him back to sleep and never told a living soul.
But the world didn't see that. The world saw Geno's arm around Sid's shoulders and Nikita between them and called it family, and the world saw Nate's devotion and called it a fanboy crush.
It was stupid. Petty and stupid and childish, and Nate hated himself for feeling it, which made the feeling worse, which made him hate himself more—a perfect feedback loop of self-recrimination that his psychologist would have a field day with if he ever admitted it out loud.
He locked his phone. Stared at the ceiling. Unlocked his phone.
The Penguins' official account had posted something new. Three minutes ago.
A video. Of course it was a video.
Nate tapped it. The caption read: The superstitions run deep in this trio.
The locker room again—postgame, partially cleared, the overhead lights bright against white tiles and dark stalls. Geno and Sid were still in their undershirts, gear stripped to the waist. Sid was sitting on Geno's stall—perched on the bench with his legs dangling, that crusty cap pulled low on his head, the same disgusting hat that had started the meme war with Nate weeks ago—and under any other circumstance Nate would have snorted at the sight of it, would have screenshotted it and sent it to Sid with seventeen crying-laughing emojis. But the bitter weight in his chest was sitting too heavy for laughter to break through.
Geno stood in front of Sid with Nikita beside him—the kid was taller now than when Nate had last seen him, a noticeable growth spurt adding inches since the time Sid had brought Nate along to visit Geno's place because Nikita had wanted to meet "the fast one" and had spent the entire afternoon asking Nate about his skating technique with the earnest intensity of a kid who'd inherited his father's competitive drive. Kids grew fast these days.
In the video, Geno was wiping something off Nikita's nose—gatorade, it looked like, or maybe sweat—with the casual, one-handed efficiency of long practice. Nikita squirmed but didn't pull away. Sid leaned forward from his perch on the stall, grinning.
"Hey, did you watch the warmups today?"
Nikita shook his head, his expression shifting into something conspiratorial. "No. I didn't want to go."
Sid raised his eyebrows. "Why not?"
"Every time I don’t go, he scores at least one goal." The kid said this with the deadly seriousness of someone presenting a scientific finding. "Every time I go he scores zero."
Geno's head turned sharply. Sid's eyebrows climbed higher. A beat of silence—and then, simultaneously:
"I hope you don't come tomorrow," Geno said.
"Keep that going," Sid said.
They spoke at exactly the same time, with exactly the same conviction, and their eyes met over Nikita's head with a look of such immediate, perfect agreement that it was almost eerie. Nikita beamed. The video ended.
Nate snorted despite himself. The two most superstitious lunatics in the history of professional hockey, validating a nine-year-old's warmup boycott theory with the solemnity of peer-reviewed research. Of course. Of course they did.
The laugh felt good for the half-second it lasted. Then the feed below the video loaded—reply after reply, quote tweet after quote tweet—and the good feeling curdled.
sid is literally nikita's other dad and nobody can tell me otherwise
the way they parent this child TOGETHER i am on the floor
this is the content i live for. forget hockey. just give me the crosby-malkin family vlog
Nate closed the app.
He set his phone face-down on the nightstand and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Breathed. In through the nose, four counts. Hold for seven. Out through the mouth, eight counts. His psychologist's voice in his head: Identify the emotion. Name it. Observe it without judgment.
Jealousy. Inadequacy. The irrational conviction that he occupied a lesser position in Sid's life than the evidence supported. Combined with—underneath it all, fueling everything—the grinding, relentless anxiety about the playoffs. The fear that he wasn't enough. That he'd never be enough. That when the pressure peaked and the lights burned brightest, he would falter again, and all the regular-season points and all the Hart trophies in the world wouldn't save him from the narrative that Nathan MacKinnon couldn't get it done when it mattered most.
The Olympics. The missed net. Wide open, could have scored blindfolded, and he'd whiffed it. The clip had been replayed so many times that Nate saw it in his sleep—the puck leaving his stick, the trajectory wrong, the awful, stomach-dropping certainty in the millisecond before it sailed wide. And the aftermath. The memes. The commentary. The measured, devastating analyses that treated a single missed shot as evidence of a fundamental character flaw.
MacKinnon chokes when it matters.
Always second to McDavid.
Can't show up on the biggest stage.
He told Sid he didn't read the comments. Told him he'd stopped looking, that his therapist had helped him establish boundaries with social media, that the noise didn't reach him anymore. And Sid would nod, and his eyes would say I know you're lying, and he wouldn't push.
Nate's phone buzzed.
He picked it up, expecting Sid. Instead: a notification from a group chat that had been dormant for over a month.
Team Canada 🍁
He opened it.
Brad Marchand had sent a link: 'Nathan MacKinnon and Jamie Benn with... an interesting exchange 🤨😅'
Then, immediately below:
Brad Marchand: good shit natedogg do it again 👍
Nate laughed—a real one this time, surprised out of him—and clicked the link. The clip was exactly what he'd expected: the altercation from tonight's game. Benn had been on him all second period, running his mouth between faceoffs, escalating from chirps to shoves with the graceless predictability of a man looking for a fight. Three separate times, Benn had pushed him—once at the boards, once in the neutral zone, once during a stoppage, each shove more forceful than the last, his visor gone from an earlier collision, his eyes hot with frustration.
Nate hadn't bitten. Had looked at Benn with an expression of such profound, tranquil disinterest that it probably stung worse than a punch would have. Tapped the man's cheek once with his glove—light, almost affectionate, the hockey equivalent of patting a barking dog on the head—and skated away.
The fan reactions were split between that's the hottest thing I've ever seen and his therapist deserves a raise and Jamie Benn has never been so disrespected in his life and he absolutely deserved it.Nate agreed with all three.
He honestly couldn't even remember what Benn had been chirping about. Something about the 4 Nations, probably. Everyone chirped about the 4 Nations. And Nate wasn't about to fight a man wearing a broken helmet without a visor—he'd been in the league long enough to know that the optics of that particular decision would follow him into the next decade regardless of who started it.
The group chat was waking up.
Seen by Marner.
Seen by Makar.
Seen by Reinhart.
Seen by Suzuki.
Seen by McDavid.
Seen by Jarvis.
Reactions began appearing on Marchand's messages—laughing emojis, fire emojis, a single prayer hands from someone Nate didn't immediately identify.
Nate: i don't know what you're talking about 🤣
Marner: thought you said fighting captains was more your type
Nate stared at the message. Thought about it for precisely zero seconds.
Nate: there's only one captain i'd want to fight 🥰
Silence.
A long, beautiful, loaded silence during which Nate could practically hear fifty professional hockey players staring at their phones with varying degrees of horror, amusement, and secondhand embarrassment.
Then:
Sam Bennett has left the chat.
Binnington: i'd like to remind everyone
Binnington: that there are other people reading your messages
Marchand: wtf where's baldy
Brad Marchand added Sam Bennett.
Marchand: @Sam Bennett stop being a pussy or i will go to your house and shave your remaining three hairs in your sleep
👎 Sam Bennett
Devon Toews: @Nathan MacKinnon that's binnington telling you to get a room you dumbass
McDavid: @Sidney Crosby
Marchand: OH YES TAG HIM. I LOVE THIS
Nate was grinning at his phone now, the heaviness in his chest temporarily displaced by the chaotic energy of fifty elite athletes behaving like teenagers. Then Tom Wilson dropped in:
Tom Wilson sent a link: 'The Panthers were officially eliminated from postseason contention after losing to the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday, 9-4'
Marchand: OH YOU ABSOLUTE PIECE OF SHIT WILSON I WILL END YOU
Wilson: just reporting the news 🤷
Marchand: YOU LITERALLY PLAY FOR WASHINGTON AND YOU ARE CELEBRATING PITTSBURGH IN THIS CHAT
Wilson: didn't say i was celebrating. just thought people should know.
Marchand: I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING
Wilson: 🙂
Marchand: DON'T YOU 🙂 ME
Binnington: this chat was peaceful for a month
Bennett: it was great
Marchand: BALDY HAS OPINIONS NOW
Nate muted the chat, still laughing, and tossed his phone onto the bed. He stood, stretched—shoulders popping, spine cracking—and walked to the kitchenette to make dinner.
Standard road meal. Grilled chicken from the team's meal service, rice, steamed vegetables. He assembled it on a plate, sat at the small desk by the window, and ate mechanically while the Dallas skyline glittered beyond the glass.
The laughter faded. The quiet returned. And with the quiet, the thoughts.
Two weeks until the regular season ended. Two weeks until the playoff bracket solidified and the real pressure began. Two weeks of games that mattered more than they should, each one a data point in the argument for or against Nathan MacKinnon's readiness for the postseason.
He tried not to think about it. Chewed his chicken. Stared at the skyline. Thought about it anyway.
Sid had known from the moment Geno came lumbering across the patio holding his phone at arm's length, laughing so hard that the tongs in his other hand were dripping barbecue sauce onto the deck.
"Sid. Sid, you have to look. Your boy. Look."
The evening air was warm—unseasonably so for Pittsburgh in late March—and Geno's backyard was lit with string lights that his wife Anna had hung for the occasion. The barbecue celebration had been Geno's idea, born from a pregame complaint that had escalated into a full-blown culinary protest: "No more your chicken parmesan, Sid. No more caesar salad. Every time milestone, you make same food. I score hat trick, I deserve real food. We do barbecue. I cook. You bring nothing. Sit down."
Sid had brought wine anyway. And a cake, because Nikita had texted him separately asking for chocolate cake with sprinkles, and Sid was constitutionally incapable of refusing a request from that kid.
He'd been sitting on the patio steps, half-watching Nikita attempt to juggle a soccer ball on the lawn, when Geno arrived with the phone.
Sid took it. On the screen: a clip of Nate and Jamie Benn. Benn shoving Nate once, twice, three times, escalating with each attempt, clearly trying to goad a response. And Nate—beautiful, infuriating, maddeningly composed Nathan MacKinnon—looking at Benn like he was a mild inconvenience, tapping his cheek with one gloved hand, and skating away without a backward glance.
Sid's mouth tugged upward. Slowly. Inevitably. This man. This ridiculous man who could throw hands with anyone in the league and chose instead to administer the most condescending cheek pat in the history of professional hockey. Sid's chest ached with something warm and fierce and exasperated.
"Is good, no?" Geno grinned, retrieving his phone. "Very calm. Very... what is word. Restrained. Not like him." He paused, considering. "Maybe your influence. You make him boring like you."
"Thanks, G."
"I say as compliment. Boring is good. Boring means no suspension." Geno shrugged with the philosophical air of a man who had served his share of supplementary discipline over two decades. "Also, Benn is idiot. Visor is broken. Nate see that. Smart."
Sid pulled out his own phone, intending to find the full clip on his socials, but the notification badges caught his eye first. The Team Canada group chat—dormant since February—had erupted. Forty-seven unread messages in the last twenty minutes.
He opened it.
Read Marchand's initial message. Scrolled past the reactions. Found Marner's comment about captains. And then—
there's only one captain i'd want to fight 🥰
Sid's face went hot.
He read it again. Then a third time, his thumb resting on the screen, a grin spreading across his face that he couldn't have suppressed with a gun to his head. The flush climbed from his neck to his ears, warm and thorough, and he was suddenly very grateful that Geno had already wandered back to the grill.
He scrolled through the aftermath—Sam Bennett's departure, Binnington's weary remonstrations, Marchand and Tom Wilson descending into full-scale warfare over the Panthers' elimination—but his eyes kept drifting back to Nate's message.
There's only one captain i'd want to fight 🥰
Sid bit the inside of his cheek. The grin behind them was so wide it hurt. The flush had spread from his ears down his neck, settling warm across his collarbones, and he was acutely aware of it—the way his body betrayed him every single time Nathan MacKinnon did something like this. Casually. Publicly. In a group chat with fifty of their peers.
Oh, this boy.
He scrolled past the chaos unfolding beneath Nate's message—Marchand in full meltdown, Wilson deliberately stoking the fire, Binnington's resigned pleas for order—and kept returning to those eleven words. Read them again. Let them sit warm and heavy in his chest like a stone pulled from a fire.
"Uncle Sid! Uncle Sid, watch!"
Nikita's voice yanked him back. The kid was standing on the lawn, soccer ball balanced on his head, wobbling with the kind of concentrated determination that reminded Sid so viscerally of Geno that it made his teeth ache. The ball lasted two seconds before rolling off and bouncing into the garden.
"Almost," Sid called, pocketing his phone. "Try bending your knees more."
"That's what Papa says."
"Papa's right sometimes."
From the grill: "I hear that. I am always right."
Sid stood, brushing grass off his shorts, and crossed the patio toward the kitchen door—ostensibly to get another glass of water. Geno intercepted him with a raised eyebrow.
"Your face is red."
"It's warm out."
"Is not warm. Is sixty degrees."
"I run hot."
Geno studied him with the leisurely scrutiny of a man who had known Sidney Crosby for twenty years and could detect a lie at forty paces. His eyebrow climbed higher. Then he glanced down at the phone-shaped bulge in Sid's pocket and his expression shifted into something unbearably smug.
"Ah," Geno said. "Nathan."
"Shut up."
"I say nothing."
"You're saying it with your face."
Geno grinned—wide, delighted, utterly shameless—and flipped a burger with a theatrical flourish. "Go call your boyfriend. Nikita and I are fine. We don't need you."
"Papa, I need him!" Nikita shouted from the lawn. "He said he'd teach me the backhand thing!"
"I'll be right back," Sid told him. Then, to Geno: "Five minutes."
"Take ten. Take twenty. I don't care. Just stop being red in my house. Is embarrassing for everyone."
Sid flipped him off over his shoulder, which earned a bark of laughter and a shouted "Very captain!" from Geno, and walked through the house to the driveway where his car was parked.
He slid into the driver's seat. Closed the door. The interior was dim and quiet, insulated from the backyard noise, and Sid sat there for a moment with his phone in his hand, thumb hovering over Nate's contact photo.
The grin hadn't faded. Probably wouldn't fade for hours. But beneath it—threaded through the warmth like a darker current—was something else. Something Sid had been carrying since the third period of the Dallas game, when he'd watched the broadcast on the locker room TV while getting stitched up from a high stick and had noticed, in the way that only someone who knew Nathan MacKinnon's body language at a molecular level could notice, that something was off.
Nate's shifts had been clean. His skating was sharp. The assist had been gorgeous. But there was a tightness in his shoulders between whistles—a held quality to his posture, a fraction of a second's delay before his celebrations—that told Sid the win wasn't landing the way it should. That Nate was already past it, already looking ahead, already running the calculations that turned every regular-season game into a referendum on his postseason readiness.
Sid had seen this before. Had lived it himself, years ago, when the weight of expectation had settled so heavily on his shoulders that every shift felt like a performance review and every missed shot felt like a verdict. He'd been twenty-two the first time the anxiety had gotten bad enough to affect his sleep—lying in hotel rooms across the continent, staring at ceilings, running through game tape in his mind until the plays blurred together and the only thing left was the hollow certainty that he wasn't doing enough. That he'd never do enough. That the city and the franchise and the legacy he was supposed to build would crumble under the weight of his inadequacy.
He'd worked through it. Slowly, painfully, with the help of people who understood and the passage of time that dulled the sharpest edges. He'd learned to live with the pressure—not to eliminate it, but to carry it in a way that didn't crush him. To use it as fuel rather than acid.
But watching Nate navigate the same terrain—the same impossible expectations, the same merciless public scrutiny, amplified by the modern media ecosystem into something inescapable and omnipresent—was its own specific kind of agony. Because Sid couldn't fix it for him. Couldn't take it from him. Could only stand beside him and make sure he knew he wasn't alone in it.
He pressed the call button.
Nate answered on the third ring. FaceTime, as always—their default, the visual connection neither of them was willing to forgo even when a voice call would have been simpler. The screen resolved, and there he was.
Nate was lying on the hotel bed, propped against the headboard, shirtless in grey sweatpants. His hair was damp from the shower, pushed back from his forehead in unruly waves, a white towel slung over one shoulder. The hotel room behind him was generic and dim—a single lamp on the nightstand casting warm, angular light across the planes of his chest and the shadows beneath his cheekbones.
He looked tired. Not the good kind of tired—the post-game, satisfying exhaustion that settled into the body like a reward. This was the other kind. The kind that lived behind the eyes and in the set of the jaw and in the barely perceptible tension running through the muscles of his neck and shoulders, as if he were bracing for something that hadn't arrived yet.
Sid saw all of it in the first second.
"Hi, handsome."
Nate shook his head, but a smile cracked through—small, reflexive, the kind that Sid's voice seemed to trigger regardless of the surrounding circumstances. "Hi."
"Big win tonight. Your 51st goal now."
"Yeah." Nate rubbed the back of his neck. "It was alright. Defense did most of the work. Scott was lights out."
Deflection. Credit redistribution. The refusal to accept a compliment directed specifically at his own performance. Sid recognized the pattern because he'd invented it himself twenty years ago and had spent the subsequent decades trying to unlearn it.
He didn't push. Didn't call it out. Instead, he settled deeper into the car seat and shifted the conversation sideways.
"You see the Benn clip making the rounds?"
The change was immediate—Nate's mouth twitching, a glimmer of amusement surfacing through the fatigue. "March sent it to the group chat."
"I know. I read the whole thing."
Nate's eyes flickered—a micro-expression, there and gone, something between sheepishness and defiance. He'd remembered what he'd typed. Of course he had.
"Including your little... declaration?" Sid kept his voice light. Teasing. Let the warmth show in his eyes without making it heavy.
Nate held his gaze through the screen. "You complaining?"
"I didn't say that."
"Bennett left the chat."
"He'll recover."
"Binner told me to get a room."
"Binner can mind his own business."
Nate laughed at that—quiet and genuine, the sound loosening something in his posture. His shoulders dropped a centimeter. His hand stopped rubbing his neck. The smile lingered, softer now, settling into an expression that was less performing-fine and more actually-fine, at least for the moment.
"Geno showed me the Benn video," Sid continued, stretching his legs out in the driver's seat. "He approves. Said you've become boring like me and that it's a compliment."
"High praise from the king of unsportsmanlike conduct penalties."
"I'll tell him you said that."
"Please don't."
Sid grinned. Quiet settled between them—comfortable, familiar, the particular texture of silence shared by two people who didn't need to fill every gap. Sid watched Nate through the screen, tracking the small movements: the way his fingers fidgeted with the towel on his shoulder, the way his gaze drifted periodically to some middle distance beyond the phone, the way his jaw tightened and released in a rhythm that suggested he was grinding his teeth without realizing it.
"Congrats on passing Yzerman, by the way," Nate said. "I saw the highlights. That power play goal was filthy."
"Thanks."
"Seventh all-time. That's insane, Sid."
"Just numbers." Sid shrugged, deliberately casual, and watched Nate's face to see if the deflection registered. It did—Nate's mouth quirking with the faint irony of hearing his own move played back at him—but he didn't comment on it. "Geno's hat trick was the real story. Three goals on twelve shots. At his age. The man's not human."
"Saw the video with Nikita too. The superstition thing."
Nate's voice was steady when he said it. Perfectly controlled. And Sid, who had spent twenty years learning to read the space between words, heard everything that wasn't being said.
"Niki's convinced he's the reason Geno scores," Sid said, keeping his tone easy. "Won't watch warmups anymore. Geno's fully on board. I think they've built an entire statistical model around it."
"Kid's probably right."
"He's definitely right. G went pointless the last two games Niki watched warmups. The data is irrefutable."
Nate smiled at that. But it didn't reach the place it needed to reach—that deep, warm territory behind his eyes where genuine amusement lived. It stalled somewhere around his mouth, convincing but incomplete, and Sid felt the ache sharpen beneath his ribs.
He thought about pushing. About saying hey, talk to me, I can see it, you don't have to carry this alone. But Nate's defenses were up—Sid could see them in the careful blankness of his expression, the practiced ease of his responses, the way he kept redirecting the conversation toward Sid's night rather than his own. Pushing now would only make him retreat further. Sid knew this because Sid knew him—knew that Nate processed his own struggles the way he processed a neutral-zone forecheck, internally and at high speed, and that external intervention before he was ready felt less like support and more like exposure.
So Sid did what he'd learned to do over the course of this relationship: he stayed. Present, attentive, undemanding. Let the conversation be light. Let the silence be comfortable. Let Nate know, through proximity rather than words, that the space between them was safe enough to fall apart in if he needed to.
"Have you eaten?" Sid asked.
Nate nodded. "Chicken, rice, vegetables. Team meal service."
Sid hummed. Didn't comment on the meal itself—never did, not anymore, having learned early on that any attention directed at Nate's food became a lens through which Nate's complicated relationship with eating was magnified and distorted. He'd figured out the boundaries through trial and error and a few conversations that had been difficult for both of them, and now he navigated them the way he navigated a forecheck: instinctively, reading the ice before him, adjusting in real time.
"Geno's grilling tonight," Sid offered instead. "He banned me from cooking for the milestone celebration. Said my chicken parmesan has personally victimized him."
"Has it?"
"It's a perfectly good chicken parmesan."
"Sid, you put nutritional yeast on it last time."
"It adds a—"
"It doesn't add anything. It's a crime."
Sid opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, something stubborn and warm sparking in his chest at the way Nate's voice had shifted—looser, less guarded, the playful combativeness surfacing like a fish rising toward light. This was the current beneath the surface. This was the real thing, the thing the anxiety and the fatigue and the self-doubt tried to bury.
"Fine," Sid conceded. "The nutritional yeast was a mistake."
"Thank you."
"But the caesar salad is non-negotiable."
"The caesar salad is fine. The caesar salad isn't the problem."
"Good. We agree."
They talked. About small things, tangential things—the specifics of Geno's barbecue technique (aggressive, heavily sauced, surprisingly excellent), the weather in Dallas versus Pittsburgh, a podcast Nate had been listening to on the team flight about sports psychology and performance anxiety that he mentioned offhandedly and then moved away from so quickly that Sid filed the detail and didn't chase it.
Sid told him about Nikita's soccer ball trick. About the cake he'd bought—chocolate with sprinkles, because Nikita asked, and Nate made a soft sound at that which Sid pretended not to hear. About the video the Pens social media team had filmed in the locker room, which Nate had clearly already watched but listened to Sid describe anyway, his expression going through a complex series of micro-adjustments that Sid catalogued and stored for later analysis.
The minutes passed. Nate's energy shifted incrementally—the tension in his jaw loosening, his breathing deepening, his blinks growing longer. The hotel room was dark around him, the single lamp painting him in warm amber, and Sid watched the fatigue assert its claim over his body in stages. Shoulders settling. Head tilting. The phone lowering from upright to a forty-five-degree angle as his arm tired.
"You should sleep," Sid said quietly.
"M'fine." Nate's voice had gone thick at the edges, consonants blurring. "Tell me more about the barbecue."
"There's nothing else to tell about the barbecue."
"Make something up."
Sid huffed a laugh. He was still in the car, the driveway dark around him, Geno's porch light a warm glow in the rearview mirror. He should go back inside. Nikita was probably still waiting for the backhand lesson. Geno was probably eating all the burgers himself. But Nate was on the other end of this call, fighting sleep with the dogged stubbornness of a man who wasn't ready to let go, and Sid wasn't going anywhere.
"Geno burned the first batch of burgers," Sid said softly. "Had to start over. Nikita told him he should've let me cook."
"Smart kid."
"He gets it from his uncle."
Nate's mouth curved. His eyes were half-closed now, dark lashes casting shadows on his cheekbones in the lamplight. The towel had slipped off his shoulder at some point, and his chest rose and fell in slow, steady rhythms. He looked younger when he was like this—stripped of the armor, the intensity, the constant vibrating readiness that defined him during waking hours. Just a man in a hotel room, exhausted and fighting it, holding onto a phone call because the person on the other end made the noise in his head quieter.
"Sid."
"Yeah?"
A pause. Nate's eyes opened—just barely, a sliver of dark iris visible beneath heavy lids. He looked at the camera. Looked at Sid.
"I miss you."
Three words. Spoken quietly, without decoration, into the dim space between his mouth and the phone screen. The kind of statement Nate usually buried beneath humor or deflection or physical contact—easier to show than to say, easier to kiss Sid quiet than to articulate the specific ache of absence. But tonight, tired and worn and carrying more than he'd admit, the words came out unguarded.
Sid's chest constricted.
"I miss you too," he said. Simply. Matching Nate's register—no embellishment, no teasing, just the truth laid bare between them.
Nate's eyes closed. His breathing slowed further. The phone tilted, settling against the pillow beside his face, the angle shifting to show the sharp line of his jaw and the curve of his ear and the dark fall of still-damp hair across his forehead.
"Two more weeks," Sid murmured.
"Mm."
"I'll be there. The whole weekend. I promised."
"Mm." Barely a sound. More vibration than voice. Nate's lips moved around it without fully opening, his body surrendering to exhaustion in increments—each breath deeper than the last, each blink failing to complete, his consciousness dimming like a light on a slow dial.
Sid watched him go. Watched the precise moment sleep claimed him—the final softening of his features, the slack jaw, the hand that had been holding the phone loosening until his fingers curled loosely against the pillow. The transition was almost imperceptible. One breath he was present, the next he was gone—dropped out of consciousness with the abruptness of a man who had been running on fumes and finally stopped.
Sid didn't hang up.
He sat in his car in Geno's driveway and watched Nathan MacKinnon sleep. Studied the face he knew better than his own reflection—the strong nose, the dark brows, the stubborn set of his jaw that persisted even in sleep. The rise and fall of his bare chest, steady and deep. The way his body had curled slightly toward the phone, as if seeking proximity even unconsciously, his face angled toward the screen where Sid's image would have been.
Sid's thumb found the screen. Traced the line of Nate's brow through the glass. Down his temple. Along the ridge of his cheekbone. The gesture was futile—glass and pixels, two thousand miles—and he did it anyway, the way he always did, because the alternative was doing nothing and that was intolerable.
He thought about the things Nate wouldn't say tonight. The playoff anxiety coiling in his chest. The missed net in Milan that Nate claimed didn't bother him anymore and clearly haunted him. The comparisons to McDavid that had followed Nate like a shadow since he was eighteen years old, always framed as a deficit, always positioning him as the lesser light. The quiet, corrosive doubt that no amount of points or trophies or MVP awards could fully extinguish.
Sid knew all of it. Had gathered the pieces over months and years of proximity—from offhand comments and sleepless nights and the particular way Nate's body language changed when certain topics arose. He knew because he'd carried his own version of the same weight for two decades. Knew what it felt like to be measured against impossible standards and found wanting by people who had never laced up a skate. Knew the specific loneliness of standing at the top of your sport and feeling, inexplicably, like you hadn't climbed high enough.
He couldn't fix it. Couldn't make the noise stop. But he could be there—steady and present and unmoving—when the noise got loud enough to drown everything else out. He could call at the right time and stay on the line and let Nate fall asleep to the sound of his breathing and wake up knowing he hadn't been alone.
Two more weeks.
Sid would be in Denver. The whole weekend. No games, no practices, no obligations except each other.
On the screen, Nate slept. Peaceful and still and unreachable, his face slack against the white hotel pillow, one hand curled near his jaw. The lamplight painted him in gold.
Sid pressed his thumb to the screen one more time—gently, over the curve of Nate's cheek—and let out a long, slow breath.
Then he pocketed his phone, got out of the car, and walked back toward the warm glow of Geno's porch light, where Nikita was waiting on the steps with a soccer ball under his arm and an expectant grin.
"Uncle Sid! You said five minutes. That was twenty."
"I know, bud. I'm sorry." He ruffled Nikita's hair. "Come on. Let's work on that backhand."
The evening continued. The barbecue was excellent. Nikita mastered the backhand flick by the third attempt and celebrated with a victory lap around the yard that was pure, unfiltered Malkin energy. Geno ate four burgers and declared himself the greatest chef in Pennsylvania. The string lights swayed in the spring breeze.
Sid smiled through all of it. Laughed in the right places. Was present in the way his teammates and his friends deserved.
And underneath, steady as a heartbeat: two more weeks, two more weeks, two more weeks.