Work Text:
The worst part about Mitch leaving wasn’t the headlines.
It wasn’t the press conference, or the endless analysis on sports networks, or the way Toronto fans talked about the trade like a funeral with salary cap implications.
It wasn’t even seeing him in another jersey for the first time.
It was the silence afterward.
Not literal silence. Mitch still texted him sometimes. Random things mostly. A picture of some ridiculous suit lining he thought Auston would hate. A video of one of his teammates butchering a card game on the plane. Occasional late-night “you awake?” messages that usually turned into conversations about anything except the things they actually meant.
But the daily texture of him was gone.
No more walking into the rink already looking for Mitch without thinking about it. No more hearing his voice somewhere down the hallway before seeing him. No more knowing, instinctively, which side of the couch Mitch would collapse onto after road trips.
Nearly a decade of somebody becoming part of your every routine didn’t disappear cleanly. It tore.
And Auston had discovered, slowly and humiliatingly, that he had built entire sections of himself around Mitch Marner without realizing it.
His apartment felt too quiet now. It felt so fucking hollow.
Auston spent more time there than he used to, mostly because going out in Toronto had become exhausting after the trade. Everyone wanted reactions from him. Speculation exploded constantly online about what had happened between them, hockey-wise or otherwise.
People noticed things. Or thought they did.
Half of everything people were saying online was bullshit, but some of it hit Auston too close to his heart for comfort.
The worst posts were the edits.
Fans stitching together years of interviews and bench clips and candid moments into compilations set to unbearably soft music. Auston had blocked entire phrases online just to stop seeing them.
You look at him like—
He stopped reading after that.
Tonight, though, he’d made the mistake of downing two glasses of whiskey alone in bed while trying to organize old photos on his phone.
That was how it started.
A normal enough thing: Delete screenshots. Clear duplicates. Try not to think too hard.
Outside, downtown Toronto blurred beneath rain-streaked windows. The city looked cold in that gray-blue way it only managed during early spring.
Auston scrolled aimlessly through years of his life.
Team dinners.
Road trips.
Pictures of his dog.
Playoff celebrations that eventually curdled into memories he couldn’t revisit too long without feeling sick.
And Mitch.
Jesus Christ, Mitch was everywhere.
Not intentionally, even. That was what got him.
Mitch asleep on planes.
Mitch making faces behind interviews.
Mitch half-visible in mirrors or reflected in restaurant windows or grinning in the background of pictures Auston hadn’t even realized he was taking.
It looked less like friendship in retrospect and more like orbit.
Auston swallowed hard and kept scrolling.
Entire years measured unconsciously through Mitch’s presence.
Then he hit the hidden folder. His thumb paused. For a second, he considered locking the phone and going to sleep like a functional person.
Instead, he opened it.
The first video loaded automatically.
Mitch on the skateboard.
“You are unbelievably bad at this,” Auston’s younger voice said from behind the camera, already laughing.
“I need you to be supportive.”
God.
Auston pressed the heel of his hand hard against his mouth. He’d forgotten how young they sounded. Not in age exactly. In certainty.
Back then, everything between them had still felt survivable because neither of them had fully acknowledged it yet. The wanting. The dependence. The terrifying way loving each other had slowly stopped feeling optional.
The video kept playing.
Mitch wobbling violently.
Mitch laughing.
Mitch looking directly into the camera afterward and saying:
“He likes me, though.”
Auston exited the clip too fast.
His chest hurt suddenly. It genuinely, physically hurt.
He stared at the screen while rain tapped softly against the windows. Then, against all self-preservation instinct, he opened the next video.
A diner booth.
Mitch stealing fries off his plate.
“You’re annoying,” Auston muttered from behind the phone.
“You love me.”
Instantly. Casual as breathing.
Not a joke even. Just fact. It was something Mitch knew in his bones. He'd said it like there was no other possibility in the world. No universe where Auston didn't love him. Maybe there wasn't.
Onscreen, Mitch smiled afterward without looking up, like he already knew the answer before Auston gave it.
The clip ended there.
Auston inhaled sharply.
Something inside him started unraveling all at once.
Because he remembered that day so specifically it could've been tattooed on his skin.
He remembered Mitch tugging him closer by the hoodie near the waterfront. Remembered going home afterward and sitting awake for almost three hours replaying those videos because he couldn’t believe how obvious he’d been.
How obvious they both were.
And somehow they still never talked about it directly.
Years of almosts.
Years of brushing past the truth carefully enough to avoid detonating it.
Auston opened the rooftop clip with shaking hands.
The screen jolted briefly before settling on Mitch sitting against the skyline in evening light.
“You’re still recording?” Mitch asked.
“You’re still talking.”
“That’s your favorite thing about me.”
Auston laughed quietly behind the camera. “Not even close.”
Mitch looked over then, smiling a little. “Okay,” he said. “What’s number one?”
The question had clearly been meant as a joke.
Auston remembered that instantly now—the exact second the air shifted between them afterward.
Because he hadn’t answered right away.
Onscreen, Mitch tilted his head slightly, nudging their knees together. And Auston remembered this. He remembered the way Mitch looked at him when he realized that Auston might tell him the truth. That maybe this would be the start of something. Auston remembered so vividly how Mitch has leaned in, like he would've been fine if Auston had to whisper it. But Auston was a fucking coward.
“Well?” Mitch had asked softly.
The camera moved a little, unsteady in Auston’s hands.
Then younger Auston said, burying the truth that raged like a bull seeing red in his heart, “Your dirty dangles, bud. Obviously.”
Silence.
Not awkward silence. Worse.
Mitch looked away first in the video, toward the skyline. To anyone else they might've thought he took it like a genuine compliment. But Auston saw the pain there. He saw how Mitch had to build a smile, nerve-by-nerve, muscle-by-muscle, because Auston couldn't be honest enough with him, for one godforsaken second, not to let him down.
“Right,” he murmured.
Auston didn't speak.
Then Mitch glanced back at the camera again, expression pained now. “Good thing you have me, then.”
The clip ended.
The room went completely silent.
Auston stared at his own reflection in the dark phone screen afterward and felt something in himself crack open violently.
Because Mitch had known.
Maybe not everything. Maybe not fully. But enough.
Enough to leave openings everywhere for Auston to step through, if he ever found the courage.
And he never had.
Not really.
He’d spent years convincing himself secrecy was noble. Necessary. Protective. Maybe it had been. Maybe hockey would’ve eaten them alive otherwise.
But sitting alone in bed now, seven years after that commercial shoot and months after Mitch had left Toronto entirely, Auston finally had to confront the possibility that fear had cost him something irreversible.
A notification buzzed suddenly across the top of his screen.
Mitch.
you still awake?
Auston stared at the message.
Then at the videos still open beneath it.
His vision blurred unexpectedly.
He realized, distantly, that he was crying before he actually felt it happen.
Not gracefully either. No cinematic single tear bullshit. His chest folded inward like something collapsing structurally, years of restraint giving way all at once.
Because Mitch was gone.
Not dead. Not unreachable.
Which somehow made it worse.
Still alive somewhere beneath bright Vegas lights. Still probably smiling exactly the same way. Still calling Auston after games sometimes without realizing he was keeping entire parts of him breathing.
And Auston loved him.
Loved him so much that even now, after all these years, his first instinct was still to protect the softer pieces of him from the rest of the world.
He looked down at the old clips again.
At Mitch laughing into the camera like he had never once doubted being loved.
Auston bent forward suddenly, pressing both hands hard against his eyes.
The sound that came out of him afterward barely sounded human.