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Will is twenty-three when he is traded to the Chicago Blackhawks.
He remembers staring out the window, thinking hollowly, it was inevitable, really, turbulence rolling under his feet. Years had passed since he was drafted, and he was no longer a rookie- no excuses of “he’ll grow into his abilities” able to cover for his weaknesses. Placed in a position next to Mack, there was nothing he could have possibly done to look better.
Then came the news of the upcoming draft, full of young generational talents with proud smiles and bright futures. Including a right-winger- a born one, not a center turned- with a faster wrist shot than him, honed instincts and bright eyes.
Will remembers it as if it were yesterday. A week after his birthday, he is changing silently after a particularly rough game against the Oilers, ribs smarting from where Draisaitl had bowled into him in a chase for the puck. Mack is waiting next to him, asking if he’s really okay, and Will is trying not to sound too pissy when he answers. Mack pokes the exposed bruises marring his side and Will hisses, snatching his hand in midair and almost missing the faint buzzing reverberating through his sweats.
He pulls his phone out of his pocket and shoves at Mack’s forehead with his other palm.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Will,” Grier’s voice echoes. “Where are you right now?”
“Uh,” Will sets his phone down to pull his shirt on. “The locker room. You’re on speaker, by the way.”
“Is anyone with you?”
“I mean, yeah,” Will drags out the yeah, gaze wandering to where Mack’s perplexed green eyes are staring straight into his skull and where the last of the Sharks are filing out, heads hung low with defeat. “Mack is. Why?”
“Right. It’d be great if you could come to my office when you’re done changing.” There’s a loaded pause, and Will suddenly gets the feeling that something very bad is happening. “Alone.”
Will’s eyes snap to Mack’s again, and he thinks Mack knows it too. His brows are crinkled, a crease forming between them where Will usually smooths it out for him. What’s this about? Mack mouths, and Will shakes his head back at him.
“Alright,” Will acquiesces after a second. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Thanks.” Grier hangs up. The click echoes throughout the empty room, and Will slowly shoves it back into his pocket as he zips his jacket up.
“What d’you think he wants?” Mack breaks the silence, hoisting his duffel up his arm as Will shoulders his own on. “Sounded serious.”
Will shrugs. “I’ve no idea,” he says despite the dread starting to boil in his gut. “Maybe like… a major line change. Involving me. I dunno.”
Mack hums, but the downturn of his mouth shows Will that he’s not convinced. “‘Kay. Can I have the keys so I can wait in the car?”
Will tosses him his lanyard as they walk out, splitting up in opposite directions as Will takes to the staff hallway.
He raps twice at Grier’s door, clicking it open with a quiet “hey”. Grier waves him over into a woolly chair across from his desk.
“Hi, Will,” Grier rests his elbows on the wood, eyes searching his face in a way that doesn’t quite feel normal. “Ribs okay?”
“Yeah,” Will shifts, feeling the ache of the bruise bleed through his body at the motion. “It’ll be fine. What’d you want to talk about?”
Silence stretches out between them for a few seconds, and Will looks up to meet Grier’s gaze.
He wishes he could say he didn’t see it coming. That he thought he was valued on this team, that it was a complete surprise that he was being traded away for a couple draft picks.
He knew it wasn’t.
Will doesn’t drop Mack off at his house that day. He calls an Uber, tears building in his eyes but never quite falling (because he can’t be both a failure and a crybaby, Jesus, he can’t possibly be be even more fucking weak). He texts Mack: take urself home today, i have to go somewhere, and Mack texts back wtf what did grier say and Will exits out of the chat, gets in the car and prays to God that the driver can’t hear him sniffling in the backseat.
He hobbles out at the nearest bar and drinks about five shots before he feels like he’s going to throw his guts up or cry again or both. He gets home in a daze, clammy fingers trembling over the Uber app once again, throwing unfolded clothes into a suitcase until he catches a glance at himself in the bathroom mirror while blindly collecting his toiletries.
If he thinks really hard through the drunken pounding of his head, he can imagine Mack standing next to him brushing his teeth after a sleepover, spitting his toothpaste in Will’s face as Will shouts fuck, that’s disgusting.
Will looks in the mirror, and suddenly the illusion is gone. His eyes are unfocusing, vision getting blurry, thinking no no no no, God no.
Will’s hands brace over the sink, crying and staring and crying and staring, grieved sobs echoing through an empty house.
Will doesn’t text Mack again, doesn’t tell him about the trade.
He’s not sure if Mack knows until the headlines come out the day after Grier told him, candids of him at the airport at six thirty in the morning with a beanie pulled low over his head and two hollow suitcases in tow.
Will Smith Traded to the Blackhawks, Smith in Exchange for #2 and #25 Picks in the 2028 Draft. Smith No Longer in Sharks, Likely to Make Room for Upcoming Rookies.
Mack doesn’t message him. Will knows he doesn’t, because he skims over the hundreds of notifications piling up from the Sharks and doesn’t see Mack’s name in any of them.
what the actual fuck smit, did yk abt this from Misa, will call me when u get off the plane from Toff, is this real from Dicky-
Will swipes out of the app and turns airplane mode on. He closes his eyes, the thrum of the safety procedure announcer’s voice piercing through his earbuds, Bluetooth because Mack had dogged on him for using wired, and prays to the Lord above that the plane crashes down into the suburbs of Davis.
Will remembers, when he was young and stupid and sixteen, a quiet girl in his church youth group raising her hand and asking a question, eyes skitting nervously over their little discussion circle.
“Do people who kill themselves go to hell?”
The seminar leader startles, longish brown hair falling across his face with the jolt. His brows crease for a split second, but soon a sad smile replaces the grief. He opens his mouth, ready to answer with a sugar-coated sickness that Will can’t bear to hear-
“Of course they do.”
The leader’s head snaps to him, dull gray eyes meeting his blue with shock, then tightly controlled rage. Will hears a mumble of agreement from his buddy next to him and feels sick to his stomach, venom running cold through his intestines, and continues despite it.
“I mean, that’s like… you’re desecrating your body, the body that God gave you,” Will’s voice came out tenfold more confident than he actually felt. “God wouldn’t forgive you. You won’t go to heaven.”
The girl looks at him, shocked, and jumps to her feet as if spooked, blond hair flowing behind her as she runs out of the room. It reminds him a little bit of his sister- of himself. The leader looks as if he wants to punch Will in the face.
A week later, Will learns that the leader’s brother had been hospitalized for depression and near-suicide the year before.
Will looks back on it sometimes and would feel bad, but by extension, that would mean feeling bad for the twenty-three year old him.
Will can’t bring himself to do that. He doesn’t deserve the pity.
Will makes a few friends. He’s not an unsociable person, so it’s not too difficult.
The first friend he makes on the Blackhawks is Connor Bedard. He’s an interesting guy, for sure. Same age as him. Good at hockey, first overall pick from the same draft pool as Will.
Will thinks the Sharks probably wouldn’t have traded Bedsy away like they did him.
Connor played on the same team as Mack when they were kids- Will knows that they keep in touch. That they talk about him, because Connor stares at him sometimes with this weird look in his eyes. Like he’s dissecting Will, searching for something that he can’t find.
Will doesn’t dare ask what they talk about.
Will is almost twenty-four when he plays against the Sharks for the first time, on the Sharks’ home ice.
He doesn’t quite understand why it took so long, to be honest- maybe the management took one look at their team, at Will, decided nah, they’re not ready, and had magically manipulated NHL schedules to put it off as long as possible. Maybe it’s God’s hand working to bless- or curse- Will.
He’s not sure.
All he knows is that he’s lining up on the ice as his eyes blur from staying up all night staring at his ceiling and worrying about the game. About seeing the number seventy-one emblazoned on a jersey, white C on teal that he can’t quite see because the name Celebrini stares at him instead, not his face, not his toothy smile as he grins and shouts fucking magic, that’s fucking right Smitty -
He is set to start the game in the faceoff. The ref tells him to get to the line and he obeys, skating over in a daze as if his limbs are frozen in the ice that surrounds him. He can feel the eyes from the other side of the rink on his face and stubbornly stares down at white CCM skates, beat up from loyal use.
Those look familiar.
He lifts his eyes to the jersey, emblazoned with a C just like it was the night before in Will’s delirium. His gaze drags upward until it stops at bright green, slightly glassy, and filled with so much rage that Will wants to physically back away-
The puck drops. Will loses.
He feels nothing as Eklund leaves him sprawling across the ice in a fight for the puck in the second period, feels nothing as he spits over his shoulder like the words are thorns tearing his throat on their way out: you never fucking texted us back, Smitty. Feels nothing as Mack looks on and ignores it when three years ago he had pounced wildly on Wotherspoon for hurting Will. Because now Will is the same as Wotherspoon to him.
Mack scores his two-hundred and fiftieth NHL point during the game. Will watches as the Sharks jump onto him, embracing and smacking him on the back. He watches as Cherny skates for the puck and remembers feeling just like him two years back.
The Blackhawks lose three to six. Two of the goals are by Will. He doesn’t look at anyone’s faces as they line up for the good games, staring at gloves so he doesn’t know who’s who. Halfway through, his fingers are caught in one person’s grasp, squeezed so hard he thinks they might break.
He stays for a second, refusing to look up at the green eyes certainly burning into his soul, and wrenches his hand away before he can regret it.
Later that night, hair dark and dripping from his shower, he flops onto clean-smelling hotel sheets as he scrolls through his messages. Everything from the Sharks is from four months ago, marked as read instead of actually looked at because he couldn’t bear the thought of actually seeing them. He opens TikTok next and pauses.
An edit of himself, but it’s not a hype or cool one. Instead, it’s him getting embarrassingly tripped by Ekky, a closeup of Mack’s eyes following the motion and snapping away as if stung. Weird lyrics pan over the screen. Will shuts his phone off and buries it under his pillow.
He wishes the ice back at the SAP Center had cracked under his feet and swallowed him up whole.
Will is twenty-five when he learns of Mack’s girlfriend.
He’s looking through Instagram posts, feed filled with clips from that day’s game captioned Embarrassing loss from Blackhawks, 4-0 loss for the Blackhawks, the Blackhawks have a million pre-10OAs so why do they keep fucking up.
What else is new, he thinks bitterly as he switches tabs to his profile, mindlessly poring over his mutuals list. He scrolls through, since when did I add this guy, but his thumb stops at one username.
Mack. He should really unfollow him, Will muses, but makes no move to press the button. Instead, he clicks into his account- like he has been every other day for the past two years.
The post is the first one on his profile.
It’s just one picture, dated to an hour ago but already boasting fifty-thousand likes. Will’s surprised it didn’t pop up on his feed.
Two portraits formatted one on top of the other. Mack, sitting at a metal cafe table, sipping at a paper cup of vanilla latte- Will can’t see it but he knows- and a girl, blonde and blue-eyed and smiling, holding a custard pastry in one hand and Mack’s outstretched palm in the other.
The post is captioned with a blue heart. Will feels like throwing up.
He wonders if Mack remembers going to that same café together three years ago, when Will had seen that it had gone viral for its walnut crumble apple crisp and dragged Mack into a thirty-minute long line just to realize that it had sold out. Will opting for some kind of tart instead and Mack a steaming latte. Sitting outside in the San Jose winter and Mack rubbing a hand heated by his coffee against Will’s forearm, berating him about wearing a T-shirt in this weather. Will ignoring the zings of electricity traveling up his shoulder, the way his breath stuttered uncontrollably for half a second, how despite himself his eyes had flicked upward to where Mack’s pink lips pressed together in concentration at heating Will up and wondered how warm his mouth was. If it tasted like vanilla bean and bitter roast.
He remembers consciously thumbing over the medallion sitting below his throat. Mack glancing at the movement and pulling his hand away.
His shaking finger hovers over the Following button, clicks it once, then again. The button turns blue. He goes back into his own profile and removes @mackcelebrini from his followers list.
The next day, he creates a burner account and refollows Mack.
Will sits on his bed at six in the morning, early morning light filtering through his shuttered windows into the dark room.
When they were younger, he and Mack would lounge about and wrestle on their hotel bed the night before an away game, jostling it so hard the poor next-door neighbors probably thought some honeymoon couple was fucking like rabbits or something. They played dirty- kicking, slapping, almost growling at each other, taking turns rolling around and pinning each other to the bed. They’d flop side by side when they were done, chests heaving and laughing uncontrollably.
Will wonders if Mack does that with his girlfriend now. If they giggle and tussle with each other in his new San Jose apartment, if Mack pins her down and suddenly the atmosphere feels tight and humid, like he can’t get enough air in his lungs. If he would feel it and realize after all these years why exactly Will was breathing so hard afterward.
Pathetic, Will thinks. Pathetic coward.
Will is twenty-six when Mack and Sophia get engaged.
He doesn’t even see it on his burner. A reel is recommended to his official account, a post-game interview of Mack, shiny and pink and smiling politely at the press.
A reporter speaks up. “What’s life been like now that you’re engaged?”
Will, zoning out at the sweat dripping down the column of Mack’s throat, snaps to attention at that. He sits up like a stick’s rammed up his ass, throw pillow falling out of his lap onto the carpet.
Mack laughs, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck as he flushes even redder. “Yeah, uh… it’s new, that’s for sure. I don’t know. I like it. Soph is amazing, a great wedding planner- me, not so much.” His voice tapers off at that.
A moment of silence.
Another reporter opens his big fat mouth and asks: “Has Smith commented about it? Well wishes, anything of the sort?”
Someone else chimes in. “Adding on to that, what are your opinions on not following or being followed by Smith anymore on Instagram? Was that a mutual agreement?”
There is a half-second where Mack’s mouth drops open slightly, the gap between his front teeth visible. His eyebrows furrow, a flash of some kind of red-hot emotion running through the pale green of his irises. Anyone else would miss it.
Will doesn’t.
Mack clears his throat. “Right. Um, no, he hasn’t said anything yet, I guess. We’re both really busy with our schedules.” A few affirming mhms chorus behind the camera. “And uh…”
There’s a pause where everyone seems to be waiting on Mack as his mouth forms around words that don’t come.
“And,” Mack finally looks up from the mic, piercing gaze going straight through Will’s heart, “I’d appreciate it if I could get less questions about Smith and my personal life and more about the game. Involving my teammates.”
The reel restarts. “What’s life been like now that you’re-”
Will clicks into the tagged list, @mackcelebrini, and his pinned post.
A picture of Sophia, smiling prettily with a large diamond glittering on her ring finger. The second slide a video of them on the beach, the sunset behind Mack and Sophia painting their figures dark as Mack kneels, a box stark in his hands.
Will taps the comments section, stares at the rest of the Sharks congratulating him- huh, that’s strange, Delly must’ve gotten traded at some point because he’s wearing a blue and white jersey in his profile picture, Will hadn’t been keeping up- and watches like he’s in another body as his thumbs hover over the keyboard, cursor blinking.
Congrats you two|
Best wishes to you guys|
Will’s fingers stop moving. Maybe this is weird. He and Mack haven’t talked in three years. They don’t follow each other anymore.
He pauses, then hunches back over his phone. The rhythm of the letters clicking is the only sound echoing through his house.
Happy for you man 💙
He presses the send button. Swipes out into his home screen.
Will checks his notifications the next day, traitorous hope blooming in his chest.
There is nothing there.
Will doesn’t even bother learning her last name. He’s sure it’ll be changed to another soon.
Will wonders to what extent God can forgive.
Would He forgive Will if he cursed Him for doing this, for exiling him a thousand miles from his home? For giving him a heart that longs only for a love that He condemns, for swearing his soul to orbit one person for all eternity, for writing in his heart the name of someone he can’t have?
Would He forgive him if, one day, he took too many of the antidepressants his doctor had prescribed him hush-hush under the cold glow of his bathroom light? If the last thing he saw through his failing vision was an outstretched hand with calluses hardening its index and middle fingers, green eyes peering down at him curiously and Mack’s voice saying, Hey, Smitty. What’re you doing on the floor? You look like you saw a ghost- c’mon, get up.
And then Will is reminded of Romans, which he’d read the night before when he’d had a particularly bad episode. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Will supposes this is his retribution.
Mack’s bought a house. It’s big, especially considering the prices in California lately.
Will looks it up on Redfin. Three beds, two baths. One room for Mack and Sophia, two for their children- Mack wants one boy and one girl and to send them both to the Sharks’ junior program.
One big living room for a knee hockey setup. A backyard with a pool.
Will’s living in an apartment in Chicago. He has one bedroom that he fucks Raya girls in. One bathroom with a large mirror that he stands in front of and envisions Mack in, washing his hands and flicking the water at Will.
One stool tucked against his kitchen island that he sits at and remembers Mack smiling at him, promising him that they would rent out a house together when they got older and keep a couple rookies fed. Will had snorted and chirped, "You'd definitely try to give them like, I dunno, Chipper everyday."
Mack huffed, jamming his fist into Will's side. "They have to live off something besides the famous Will Smith chocolate chip banana bread." Will punched him back, and Mack laughed.
Mack's allowed- justified- to be mad at him, honestly. They had promised, after all.
But people had also promised Will that he would retire a Shark, that WillMack would be known in the NHL, and look where they are now.
Will thinks he deserves to feel angry, too. The problem is who to be angry at.
Will watches the clip in his hotel room, ribs clenching into a fist and crushing his heart, after his afternoon game against the Sharks. Over the years, the rest of the Sharks had started forgiving him. He'd even met up with Toff that morning over coffee (and had muffled his cries embarrassingly into Toff's jacket, but that was besides the point).
"He's been waiting for you," Toff had said firmly but gently when Will finally pried himself off his shoulder. "You took the first step away. Now you have to take the first step back to him."
But Mack hadn't been at the game. Will sees why now.
It’s a five-minute clip on TikTok. Mack’s made his own account now. His username is an apt mackc71, and he has thousands of followers, more than their shared account has now. Probably because there’s been absolutely nothing on that account for four years.
Sophia’s walking down the aisle, the coastal air blowing her perfect blonde hair into disarray as her father leads her by the arm. She’s giggling, lifting a hand over her face and attempting futilely to tame her curls. The camera pans over to where Mack’s waiting by the altar, and he’s smiling too, all teeth and gums and so, so pleased.
Will wasn't invited. He doesn't know if it would've hurt more or less if he was.
He watches the vows. He watches the kiss. He watches as Mack sweeps Sophia off her feet in a bridal carry, watches as she throws her head back and laughs with her whole being.
He watches. He lets it happen, like the fucking coward he is.
The video ends. The caption reads: Packing for the offszn honeymoon as we speak 💙.
It must be God's plan.
Will has to take the first step.
hey
i'm going back to chicago after the wknd
can we meet up tmw or smth? i wanna catch up
we haven't talked in a while
it's ok if u can't
btw congrats on the wedding
u guys look good tgt
fine
where?
Even if it hurts like hell.
He's been waiting for you.
That night, after scrolling mindlessly through Raya post-shower, Will gets on his knees beside his bed. He runs a thumb over his rosary ring, cold against his collarbone, and prays.
God, grant me peace and purity when I see him tomorrow.
Let them stay together forever.
Let their love be sinless.
He ignores the choking feeling of pain clouding his brain and threatening to burst out through tears flowing down his face. He ignores how he wishes Mack was sitting on the bed in front of him, pulling off his Sharks hoodie and chucking it somewhere out in the room. God, Willy, we gotta decorate sometime. It’s fucking depressing in here.
You're talking to him for the first time in five years tomorrow, Will reminds himself. You'll fix things, and you'll be best friends again. You didn't get to watch him earn the C, or celebrate him buying his first house, or bake brownies for the rookies with him, but you can be his children's godfather or some shit.
That'll be enough.
He ignores how, when he closes his eyes and thinks of nothing, the ring sitting at the base of his throat feels like it could mean something else.