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Parker's first thought is that Smith is hurt.
His second thought is that somebody is trying to remove his head from his shoulders.
His third thought, after identifying the assailant as nineteen-year-old Macklin Celebrini, is that perhaps everybody could benefit from taking a deep fucking breath.
The thing about being punched by a teenager is that it’s usually significantly less intimidating than the movies want you to believe. Parker’s been in his fair share of NHL fights, and, usually, he only manages a laugh when a guy who can’t even grow a beard wants to pick a fight with him.
Unfortunately for him, Mack came at him like a particularly angry bowling ball.
He really didn’t think much about the hit when it was happening. Of course he didn’t. He has been playing hockey for more than twenty years—he’s completed hundreds, if not thousands, of those hits. He knows it was clean.
Only when he watches it back later does the sequence of bad luck snap into focus, the way angles and timing conspired to separate Will Smith’s shoulder from where it should have stayed lodged in its socket. He remembers the urge to apologize bubbling up but by then Parker had already had an arm around his neck and a feral Celebrini at his throat.
They hit the ice in a tangle of limbs and gear. The cold does nothing to cool anyone’s nerves, least of all Celebrini’s, who is still screaming bloody murder into Parker’s ear.
He isn’t an idiot. He’s heard how close Celebrini and Smith are—even the goddamn NHL account won’t shut up about it. It reminds him of Sid and Geno, even if the league still pretends close friendships are a novelty. Still, it doesn’t feel like grounds for decapitation over a clean hit with an ugly ending.
Sid corners him in the tunnel after the game, everybody still raw from a loss that didn’t look like a loss until it was already too late. Parker can’t get the clips they showed on the jumbotron out of his head: Celebrini being escorted to the box; Smith, doubled over in pain, ripping off his glove before disappearing down the tunnel. They’ve all seen enough injuries to know he won’t be back for a while. Parker doesn’t mind a hit or two, but he never means to seriously hurt somebody.
“You okay?” Sid asks.
“Smith isn't.”
“No.”
Sometimes Parker appreciates Sid’s straightforwardness. Sometimes he wants to strangle him over it. Right now, it’s both.
“Celebrini tried to take my head off,” Parker says.
Sid snorts. “Yeah. I’m not surprised.”
Parker whips his head around. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Sid looks at him like he’s missed the world’s easiest open-net. “You think Geno wouldn’t do the same?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s Geno. He’s crazy about you.”
Sid walks off like that’s the end of the discussion, because for Sid, apparently, it is.
They don’t play each other again during the season, so Parker reaches out through his agent with an apology. The text is tidy, sincere, and goes unanswered.
It doesn’t take long for Parker’s name to stop coming up in the context of hockey.
Parker has fought Corey Perry. He has fought Matthew Tkachuk. After years of hard work, he has finally made a name for himself as a half-decent defenseman in the NHL, not afraid of taking it where it hurts.
Then, one clean hit goes wrong, and suddenly Parker Wotherspoon is no longer a defenseman of the Pittsburgh Penguins, but the villain in an angsty teenage romance he had zero interest in auditioning for, thank you very much.
At first, he assumes the internet is doing what the internet does when somebody gets hurt: being dramatic, bloodthirsty, and functionally illiterate about the rules of hockey.
Then he starts to notice that the edits are not necessarily about the hit itself.
They start with the hit, sure. Smith going into the boards. Celebrini launching himself at Parker like someone fired him out of a cannon. But then they cut to clips Parker has never seen before: Smith and Celebrini laughing on a bench, Smith shoving Celebrini’s shoulder in a game of football, Celebrini staring at him during warmups as if Smith personally invented the concept of hockey.
The captions are where Parker starts to lose the plot and his sanity.
protecting what’s his
how dare you hurt helen of troy
generational talent at ass whooping
Do your civic duty and call your representative (SidCros) NOW and demand Wotherspoon be scratched
Where before there might have been a GIF of a good play or a cool hit of his, there are now a million and one edits of the hit in 0.25x speed to every song ever uploaded to Spotify. By the next week, half his mentions are death threats with profile pictures of Smith; the other half are…charts? Diagrams? He’s pretty sure someone is drawing relationship webs like this is a high school mind-map.
(He has to ask a trainer what “shipping” means. He hates that he has to ask a trainer what “shipping” means.)
And look, Parker does not care if two teammates are together. Hockey players are, in his experience, already codependent in ways that would send most therapists into a panic.
What he cares about is being told by several thousand teenagers—kids who have somehow constructed an entire relationship out of two seasons worth of hockey content—that he is the one responsible for it. But they made up the story in their head and on their TikToks, where these two kids are the leads of some modern hockey epic, and Parker himself is the catalyst for them figuring things out. And there’s just no way that is true.
It’s insulting. Not the death threats—he is a grown man, he can deal with those—but the plot device he has become.
When the call comes to ask him to join the World Championship in Switzerland, he immediately says yes. It doesn’t matter that they only got eliminated from the playoffs the day before. He hasn’t worn the maple leaf in over a decade, and the chance to represent Canada again makes the choice a no-brainer, even if his body feels every one of those ten-plus years when he gets out of bed in the morning.
Also, selfishly, it sounds nice to play hockey somewhere his name might mean hockey again.
For six whole hours, Parker gets to enjoy the feeling of excitement. Then, Hockey Canada announces that Macklin Celebrini will join the team.
Parker briefly considers calling his agent to ask whether it is too late to develop a minor but respectable lower-body injury. He doesn’t, because he is an adult and a professional. And because his agent would most definitely laugh at him. And say no, too.
By the time they land in Paris, Parker has talked himself into being normal about it.
This is a short tournament. They are all adults (except for the teenagers who apparently run the league now). They are all here to play hockey. Celebrini will probably be awkward, Parker will be polite, and nobody will attempt to kill him on international ground.
Mere hours after they land, Celebrini is named captain of Team Canada. It somehow feels worse than the awkwardness and attempted murder that Parker had been expecting from this trip. Instead, it feels like the second act of a story about this nineteen-year-old hockey phenom where Parker is the comedic relief with no dialogue.
The worst part is that Celebrini is good at it.
Parker was prepared for talent. Half the league is talented and insufferable about it. Talent is easy to resent. Talent does not require Parker to adjust the neat little picture he has built in his head of Macklin Celebrini as a short-tempered, annoying kid with a taste for violence.
Leadership is more irritating.
Leadership means Parker has to update the file from temperamental teenager who tried to murder me at center ice to temperamental teenager who tried to murder me at center ice and also apparently knows how to run a room.
Parker resents this deeply.
They win the friendly in France, and it’s fun, because, despite everything, Parker remains weak to the very annoying experience of enjoying hockey. When it gets announced after the game that Sid will join them for the tournament, Parker feels like he can take a breath again.
Finally.
His real captain can take over.
The morning after Sid arrives, Parker walks down to the breakfast bar and catches Celebrini and Sid mid-argument.
“—you take the C,” Celebrini says, jaw set.
“No,” Sid says through a mouthful of eggs. “You’re the captain.”
Parker plops down with his bowl of muesli and tries his best to ignore the bickering.
“No, you’re—” Celebrini cuts himself off like even he knows arguing with Sidney Crosby is a losing game. “You should be.”
“I’m not,” Sid says.
“You’re Sidney Crosby.”
“Yeah,” Sid says, entirely unimpressed by this fact. “And you’re the captain.”
They ping-pong it back and forth until finally Sid puts his foot down with that ancient-god finality that has shut up locker rooms for the better part of two decades. Celebrini blinks, swallows, nods, and accepts the C as if it physically pains him.
Parker looks around for someone else to intervene. Nobody does. In fact, most of the others are watching with fond little smiles, like this is charming and not a constitutional crisis. Captain Canada has abdicated. The teenage romance lead remains in charge.
Parker stares into his soggy muesli and wishes he, too, could drown in milk.
Sid wins. Celebrini and Parker lose, which means that Celebrini gets the C and Parker gets a stress headache.
He finds Sid later by the coffee table.
“Why does everybody instantly love this kid,” he grumbles, pouring too much milk into his coffee. “He tried to fucking kill me.”
Sid snorts into his coffee. “You hit his Smitty.”
“Cleanly.”
“Doesn’t matter much to him. He still had to play more than a month without his favorite right wing.”
Parker hates captains. He has decided this. All of them. Captains, alternates, junior captains, whatever Sid is. The whole species.
They’re down one after the first against Czechia in a game that feels less bad than irritating—as if everybody is just one step behind. Passes end up on the other team’s stick. Reads happen half a second too late. It’s nothing catastrophic, just annoying.
The room between periods has that eerie sort of quiet, where even undoing the velcro straps of his body armor feels too loud. It usually means everybody is thinking too hard.
Parker is busy adjusting his gear when he notices Celebrini across the room.
He’s crouched in front of Nurse, who looks like he’s still blaming himself for not getting the puck out of their zone before the goal against. Parker knows it wasn’t really on him—he had been on the ice too, after all—but he also knows how hard it is to accept that sometimes the other team just wins a shift.
Celebrini is saying something too quiet for Parker to understand, and taps him once against the knee pads.
Whatever it is that he said, it works.
Nurse looks up and says something back. His shoulders loosen just the slightest, and the tight line between his brows disappears.
Celebrini nods once, gets back to his feet, and moves on. Parker glances around, expecting at least one other person to find it ridiculous that a nineteen-year-old is apparently going stall to stall resetting men twice his age.
Nobody does. If anything, they look at him with the sort of fond, easy trust Parker finds deeply irritating.
Parker hates when kids are good at their job.
Neon lights are dancing around the walls, highlighting the women dancing on a table.
Parker lasts a whole twenty minutes in the stuffy room, smelling faintly like perfume and a lot like the smoke billowing from the smoke machine. He cuts towards the side entrance and finds Celebrini tucked into a shadowed corner, one shoulder against the wall, phone held low. His face is lit up by the screen, the soft smile on his mouth so out of place in the neon lights that Parker almost feels like he has walked in on something private.
Then he hears the voice from the phone. A voice Parker knows all too well from one too many late nights scrolling through edits. Though it sounds a lot less giggly and a whole lot more sincere than in most of the clips.
“You look tired,” Smith says, tinny through the speaker.
Celebrini’s eyes crease when his smile takes over his entire face. “Miss you too, Smitty.”
Parker stops so hard he nearly spills his drink. Because that is not what Smith had said. It is, however, very obviously what Celebrini had heard in it.
He turns around, back towards the rest of the team, and has a sudden, horrible thought that maybe the teenagers with the fancams had not invented this thing from nothing.
Somehow, Smith isn’t even in this country and is still the most important person in the room, as far as Celebrini is concerned.
They lose the semifinal against Finland.
The horn goes off, and for a second, nobody moves.
Then hockey does what hockey always does. Gloves tap helmets. Goalies get crowded. Guys fold into each other at center ice because there is a choreography to losing, same as anything else.
Parker ends up near the edge of the group. He looks for Sid first, out of habit, but his eyes land on Celebrini instead.
Mack is a few meters away from the huddle, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, head low. Nobody goes to him.
Not because they don’t care, Parker knows that immediately, and somehow that makes it worse. They don’t go because he’s the captain now. Because he is the one who goes to everyone else.
By the time they get back to the locker room, Celebrini is already doing it. Media first, then the slow lap around the room, hand to a shoulder here, a quiet word there. He tells the goalie they don’t get there without him. Tells his Sharks teammate that he did a hell of a job for his first Worlds game ever.
It is, annoyingly and terribly, good.
And Parker suddenly remembers that locker room scene from earlier in the tournament. The way Celebrini built the guys up after a bad period. The way he’s always the last man on the ice. The way everybody listens when he talks. And it hits him that Mack is doing it again. That he’s taking care of everyone except himself.
Parker looks away.
They still have the bronze medal game, he tells himself. The kid will bounce back. Players like that always bounce back.
He tries not to think about how young nineteen looked from a few meters away on the ice.
They lose bronze.
It’s brutal, in a way only a game where you regain some hope in the last seconds, only to see it all crashing down only minutes later, can be.
The locker room afterward is quiet in a different way than Finland had been. Where the game against Finland had hurt, this one just feels hollow. Like somebody had sucked all the emotion from their team and dumped it into a container labeled “nevermind, try again next year.”
Parker sits at his stall longer than necessary, untying and retying the same shoe because, apparently, that is the level of useful he has reached. Across the room, Celebrini answers a question from a trainer with a nod. Then another. Then he disappears down the hall before anyone can decide whether to follow.
It’s not a conscious decision. And yet it doesn’t take Parker more than a few seconds to get up and follow.
He finds Mack near the end of the corridor. Not Captain. Not generational talent. Just nineteen-year-old Mack, back against the wall, shoulders rounded as if he has finally run out of places to put the weight. His green eyes have gone glassy.
Parker remembers watching the Olympics. The silver medal. He remembers reading something about the Sharks missing the playoffs by a breath, about how much Mack had dragged them forward anyway. He remembers thinking, vaguely and without much investment, that for someone with that kind of career already, the kid had still never really won anything.
And this is a kid who not only cares about everything too much, but also carries the weight of both a franchise and a country on his shoulders. A kid whose first reflex, when something goes wrong, is not to look for someone else to lean on, but to decide he will handle it. Fix it. Carry it.
Parker stops at a polite distance. He hates this part. He’s bad at it, but he knows he has to do it anyway. He clears his throat.
“You were our best player out there,” he says, voice rough. “I hope you know this isn’t your fault.”
Mack nods, but it’s obvious he doesn’t agree. The words slide off like rain on a windshield. Parker doesn’t call him out.
“You’ll get another shot,” he adds, and he believes it even if it sounds like a lie right now. “You’ll show it to them soon enough.”
For a second, Mack says nothing. Parker thinks maybe that’s it, that maybe he’s overstepped and this entire interaction is about to die a slow and awkward death in the hallway.
Then Mack drags a hand over his face and whispers, almost inaudible, “I’m so tired of losing.”
Parker swallows.
“Yeah,” he says, because he has absolutely nothing useful to offer against that. “I figured.”
Mack lets out something that might have been a laugh in a less miserable universe. It dies halfway out.
The silence that follows is only broken when footsteps echo down the hall.
Parker turns first. A few steps away, clad in a hoodie and travel-creased jeans, is Will fucking Smith. He looks a little out of place in the concrete corridor of the Swiss hockey arena.
Parker doesn’t know who let him into the players’ area of the arena or how he even got into this country. Maybe the universe simply opened a door for him because, apparently, it is still committed to the bit.
Smith’s eyes find Mack immediately.
“Hey,” he says, and it visibly unravels something in Mack so completely that Parker feels weirdly embarrassed witnessing it.
Mack pushes himself off the wall and closes the distance in three quick strides. Smith catches him like he knew exactly what was coming, one hand going to the back of Mack’s neck, the other settling between his shoulder blades. Mack folds into him, face disappearing against Smith’s shoulder, and for the first time since the final horn, he actually lets go.
Parker looks away.
Okay, he thinks.
So the internet might not have been entirely making shit up.
Later, when the room has thinned, and Mack has been dragged into a conversation with Sid, Smith sits on the bench beside Parker.
For a second, neither of them says anything.
Parker has imagined this conversation more times than he wants to admit. In most versions, Smith hates him. In some, Smith is polite about hating him, which is worse. In one particularly bad version he conjured up after too much coffee and not enough sleep, Smith thanks him for the apology, and then Celebrini appears from a vent like an angry raccoon.
In real life, Smith just looks tired.
“Sorry about the shoulder,” Parker says, because it’s been sitting in his mouth for months like a chipped tooth.
Maybe now he can spit it out and be done. Maybe he can finally escape the narrative that has somehow been built between him and Mack and Will. Maybe he can go back to being Parker Wotherspoon, hockey player.
Smith shrugs. "Shit happens.”
Parker blinks.
“And thanks for your message by the way," he adds, when it becomes clear that Parker is still trying to catch up.
“I didn’t answer because Mack finally started to stop hissing every time someone mentioned your name,” Smith explains when Parker still doesn’t manage anything smarter than staring at him. “Didn’t really feel like poking it.”
All this time, he’d assumed Smith hated him. Fairly so, even. Who cares if the hit was legal if it almost ended your season? Parker had figured the silence was the answer. Apparently not.
“So you don’t hate me,” he says, because that is somehow the part of this conversation his brain has chosen to get stuck on.
Smith shrugs. “I mean, I wasn’t thrilled. But it wasn’t exactly your fault.”
Parker lets out a short breath through his nose. “Tell that to him,” he says, flicking his chin toward Mack across the room, who’s already looking seconds away from bolting over to steal his Will back.
Smith laughs, quiet and a little mischievous, like he is in on a joke Parker hasn’t heard yet. “Yeah, he’s still not quite over it.” He glances across the room, something fond replacing the amusement in his face. “Which is funny, really. Considering.”
Parker looks at him, his stomach dropping. “Considering what?”
Will just shrugs and tips his head in the direction of Mack. Across the room, Mack catches Will looking and immediately softens into something Parker is starting to understand against his will.
Parker is pretty sure that he knows what this is about, but for the sake of his sanity, he makes the executive decision not to think about this any more than he has already been forced to. Maybe, if he’s lucky, the Sharks will make the Playoffs every year from now on, and he won’t have to endure another World's tournament under Captain Macklin Celebrini.