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“Oh shit. The Centaurs’ plane is on fire!”
Hayden feels his head snap up involuntarily and turn sharply in JJ’s direction, the open top button of his dress shirt temporarily abandoned. “What are you talking about?”
“Last report is that the engine caught fire while they were over Florida.” JJ keeps reading aloud from the borderline useless article. (Seriously, fuck whoever tried to stretch ‘we don’t know anything yet’ into a 500-word piece of clickbait.) Hayden tunes him out after a while, telling himself that nothing catastrophic can actually happen here; everything almost always turns out fine in situations like this, doesn’t it?
Except then he can’t stop himself thinking about that movie he saw a few years ago. The one where the plane crashed in the 1970s and a whole college football team died, and he can’t remember for sure, but he thinks it actually happened-
Knock it the fuck off, man. Hayden shudders, shaking off the sudden dread, and glances toward the stall to his left. And he can’t believe he thought he was in a bad spot.
Shane is rapidly scrolling on his phone, his eyes threatening to burn a hole through the screen and his jaw clenched hard enough to make four out of five dentists shudder. None of that is particularly unusual; it just means there’s something going on in his head that he’s not keen to share with the world. Every Voyageur has seen this expression during games that aren’t going well, amid particularly stupid press conferences, and at hotel breakfast buffets overrun with simple carbs.
The thing is, Hayden is fluent in his best friend’s tells – so unlike their teammates, he notices when Shane curls in on himself just a little, shoulders slowly ascending toward his ears. A little lower down, he notices what looks like a tiny faint strobe light; Hayden’s momentarily baffled until he looks up and realizes it’s coming from the fluorescent ceiling tube reflecting off the phone screen. And it appears to be flashing because… yep, Shane’s hands are beginning to shake. He hears a soft but sharp inhale as Shane’s breaths start to become faster and shallower.
Shit. Hayden’s never been so grateful to be in a locker room full of doofuses, but even they’re not likely to be eternally oblivious to this. And sure enough, a few seconds later he catches Comeau in his peripheral vision, nudging Miitka and muttering, “The fuck is wrong with Hollander?”
(Whoomp, there it is.)
Eyes back on Shane, he thinks about his friend’s past allusions to anxiety. He knows Shane always downplays it, never wanting to be regarded as less than, but the one time Hayden saw a full-blown panic attack, around four or five years ago now, it immediately secured a place in his long-term memory. Specifically the hotel room carpet, of all things; fading navy blue, knobbly texture beneath his bare feet as he crouched down next to Shane, who had slid down the wall as soon as he walked back in the room. Shane’s knees were pulled up to his chest, his head tucked down as he silently gasped for air. He didn’t respond to Hayden softly saying his name, but when Hayden reached out tentatively to place a hand on his shoulder, Shane pulled away forcefully and folded even deeper into himself, head shaking no over and over. He wouldn’t answer any of Hayden’s questions, even whether he was okay – which, in retrospect, was pretty fucking stupid to ask when the answer couldn’t have been clearer – and it seemed to go on forever, Hayden vacillating between bewilderment and horror.
And then Shane stood up, wordlessly (if shakily) walked into the bathroom, and Hayden listened to the shower run for the next 45 minutes and wondered what (or who) the hell in Boston broke his friend.
Shane didn’t bring it up the following morning, or ever again. Hayden obviously understands better now what was going on then – it admittedly may have taken Jackie dropping an informational anvil on his head, but that’s not what’s important here, okay? What matters is that’s whatever’s happening with Shane right now is way beyond run-of-the-mill annoyance or intense focus. He’s rapidly evolving toward something Hayden knows he would probably rather die than let the rest of the team see in full effect, especially given how shitty they’ve been since he came out.
(Although.
It occurs to Hayden that ‘die’ is probably in poor taste in light of the circumstances. Obviously he hopes not – as that stupid news alert said approximately 40 billion times, nobody has any actual information – but maybe ‘eat a pint of fancy ice cream in one sitting’ is a sufficiently unpleasant alternative for the guy on the macrobiotic diet.
Okay. Rephrasing. Shane would rather snarf down a couple cups of full-fat dairy and sugar, with all the gastrointestinal consequences that would entail, than let his mostly-homophobic teammates see him in the vulnerable state toward which he appears to be hurtling.
Except they usually share a room on the road, and this scenario would mean Hayden would also be suffering the consequences-)
Dude, fucking focus, he mentally chides himself, his inner voice sounding suspiciously like Jackie. You’ve reached your digression quota for the day.
Hayden cares about Shane, is the long and short of it. He knows what it’s like to watch Shane struggle to maintain composure because of Ilya Rozanov – even if the context is totally different this time – and he’ll never forget how much it sucked feeling totally helpless in that hotel.
One way or another, he’s going to do better this time.
“This is fucked up,” he suddenly hears himself say, voice loud enough to carry over the din. Slowly, the scattered conversations cease, his teammates looking at him quizzically.
Great. In classic dog-who-caught-the-mail-truck fashion, he has successfully drawn everyone’s attention to himself. What the fuck is he supposed to do now?
Because Hayden’s not great at bluffing. If anything, he’s far too transparent in every way; Jackie loves to say the only way she wouldn’t know what he’s thinking is if she were in a sensory deprivation chamber. But as he’s mentally grasping at straws, he thinks about last January, when the flu swept through the entire roster.
Jackie banished him to the guest room for five days so he wouldn’t get the kids sick. Meanwhile, Arthur was bogarting their only functioning iPad after all the others had mysteriously fallen down the stairs (the twins kept blaming Amber, which Hayden seriously doubts to this day given the science unit on gravity they had just finished in school). His phone screen was too small to focus on for very long, and his vision started blurring anytime he tried to read for more than three minutes anyway. So his only source of entertainment was the afterthought of a TV in there, with minimal basic cable options.
The least boring of which was somehow a local access channel that featured several hours of Whose Line is it Anyway? reruns every afternoon and evening.
He must have watched at least 20 hours’ worth of improv during his quarantine. It wasn’t like he was taking notes on their technique when his priority was to not hack up a lung, but he certainly remembers enough of it. And as he stands in the locker room, it’s increasingly obvious that if ever there has been a time to get his ’yes and’ on, it’s now.
Hayden deliberately widens his eyes and motions to Shane. “What’s wrong with him? What the fuck is wrong with all of you?” He scoffs, channeling Ruby when someone has the audacity to tell her no. “He’s the only one seeing the bigger picture here.”
A beat of silence follows, and then Gagnon cocks his head. “The bigger picture being… what?”
Opting for a quintessential Jade move this time, Hayden hits him with a withering stare and retorts, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe that we have no idea what happened to an entire fucking team? They are part of the league just like we are-“
“The losing part,” Comeau mutters.
Someone toward the back snaps, “Shut the fuck up, Gil.”
Buoyed by the apparent support, Hayden continues. “Their record doesn’t fucking matter, okay? They are just like us. They’re our… our brothers in… sticks.”
And holy fuck, Hayden acutely understands the meaning of ‘deafening silence’ in a way he never has before.
Rozanov better not be dead right now, because I need this shit to be funny someday.
Hayden struggles not to cringe at himself and lets his eyes dart around the room, where expressions run the gamut from intrigue to disgust. Even Shane has momentarily stopped refreshing – is that Instagram? Whatever, doesn’t matter – and is looking up at him in utter confusion.
(Which: genuinely great that Shane’s distracted from his impending panic attack – but dear God, how incredibly stupid must Hayden have sounded to have such an impact?
Well. Not really like he can stop now.)
“It could have been us! It could have been any team plane,” he continues, praying he sounds a lot more sure of himself than he feels. “Those charter flights all come from private companies, do any of us know what the regulation is like?”
He takes an excruciatingly slow breath in an attempt to stall, so he can figure out what bullshit to spew next, and-
“Pike’s got a point.”
Oh, thank God.
“I saw a film about how airlines don’t check their cargo well enough,” Wilson says solemnly. “You don’t even know what’s on board, or if it’s dangerous.”
(Huh.
Wilson watching documentaries about the airline industry was definitely not on Hayden’s bingo card, but whatever, people contain multitudes.)
Across from them, Gagnon mulls this over. “You know, there was that time two years ago – remember the blizzard in Denver, when we were stuck in the airport for like, five hours?”
There’s a general rumble of agreement.
“I overheard management fighting with the charter company, because they were gonna charge the team extra fees if their plane stayed grounded much longer. They really wanted their own pilot flying through that?”
“Yeah, that storm was no joke,” Miitka chimes in. “Trying to make us pay them for an act of God is a little sketchy.”
“You think that’s sketchy?” JJ leans forward. “What about in September when the flight attendant told us we couldn’t sit in the last row because the seats there didn’t have oxygen masks?”
The room explodes. “Oh shit!” “Yeah!” “Who’s to say any of the ones they did have would have even worked?”
(Hayden has no idea anymore who’s participating in this chorus of indignation, but enough of his teammates are invested now that no one is looking at Shane. Which is really all he cares about.)
“Remember when they lost contact with air traffic control and we circled for an hour and a half right over Trudeau?” Drapeau gripes. “I missed my kid’s dance recital. My wife was pissed.”
“Were you, though?” JJ asks with a smirk.
“She thinks I was,” Drapeau shrugs.
Couillard stands up suddenly. “What about last week when I requested chicken ahead of time and they ran out before they got to me? I got stuck with the goddamn vegan option.”
Everyone groans. “That’s not a safety issue,” JJ points out.
Gagnon snorts. “It is when you share a bathroom with him after he eats a fuck ton of kale.”
(Hayden decides not to remind everyone that the vegan option Couillard is bitching about was actually what Shane ordered, but they were short one meal on the plane and Shane insisted Couillard take the tray. Because as the captain, he needed to make sure his team was good before he worried about himself.
God. Shane really is light years above every one of these pricks.)
“It’s a problem, though,” Couillard persists. “Look, if they can’t get the most basic things right, how are we expected to trust them with our literal lives?”
“We should do something,” Drapeau says slowly. “To let them know we’re not going to compromise our safety.”
(Hayden can practically see the lightbulb going off in his head.
Like the rest of Patrice, it’s pretty fucking dim.)
“Or let them do it to any other players,” JJ chimes in.
The locker room devolves into pandemonium at this point, everyone starting to crowd around a couple phones. Hayden looks back at Shane, who’s managed to finish getting dressed and packed in the last few minutes. “Go,” he murmurs. “Get out of here, figure out what’s going on with your guy.”
Shane blanches momentarily and starts to nod, then stiffens. “I probably have press, though.”
Hayden rolls his eyes. “I’ll do it. Just go, I’ll tell them you had an emergency.”
“Hayd, you’re not gonna tell them about-“
“Jesus, dude, of course not!”
(After all this, Shane can’t possibly have that little faith in him, can he?)
“I know. Sorry, I don’t know why I asked.” Shane hesitates, but nods again, ghost of a smile crossing his face. “Look... thanks.”
Hayden shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. Keep me posted, okay?” He turns back to the cluster of idiots on his right, who inexplicably seem to be arguing about rhyme schemes.
Not two minutes after Shane slips out of the locker room, Theriault barges through the door, their social media manager Veronique on his heels. “Hollander, we need you for press in five!” he barks, looking around the room. Noting Shane’s absence after a moment, Theriault looks toward Hayden with narrowed eyes. “Pike, where the hell is he?”
Hayden shakes his head as dramatically as he can muster. “He had an emergency, Coach. Had to go.”
“What emergency?” Theriault demands.
Yeah, dumbass, what emergency?
“Kale,” Hayden blurts out, mouth once again outrunning his brain. “He, uh, had some bad kale. It’s not pretty, you know, all that stuff living in leafy greens if you don’t wash them right, bacteria and, uh, parasites and-“
“Enough,” Theriault grimaces. “You’re up, then. Take Wilson with you.”
So he does. He’s not the biggest fan of doing press – he’s neither impeccably media-trained like Shane nor entirely devoid of fucks to give like Rozanov – but he can handle boilerplate questions about his assists in the first and second periods, the penalty kill in the third, and the feeling on the bench when they pulled ahead with five minutes to go.
(Somehow, in the total insanity that has been the last half hour, Hayden managed to forget that they won the damn game.
Yay for them.)
Wilson mostly sits there like a lump, but once in a while Hayden pointedly nudges him under the table and he’ll nod emphatically in agreement. Good enough, and thankfully they’re almost done. Veronique is giving the signal to wrap it up, selecting a reporter in the back row for the last question.
The guy stands up. “Sean Nelson, Blue Line Daily. Great game tonight, guys. I was just wondering if you heard about the Centaurs’ plane during the game?”
Hayden blinks and waits. Nope, that is in fact the entire question. Okay, then. “Uh… no, no. We heard about it after. But, um… you know, we’re all wishing them the very best and hoping to hear good news soon.”
“Well, it was just announced that they landed safely in Tampa,” Sean replies. “From the reports that have been released so far, it sounds like everyone onboard is okay.”
Hayden exhales fully for the first time since he stepped off the ice. “That’s great to hear.”
“Oh, definitely – but Pike, I have to ask about the hashtag.”
The what now? “Hashtag,” he eventually repeats, knowing full well his face is blank.
Sean raises an eyebrow. “On the posts from your teammates? At least eight of them have posted about airplane safety in apparent solidarity with the Centaurs… and they’re all using the hashtag ‘HockeyFightsForSaferFlights.’”
“It’s going viral,” another reporter pipes up in a way Hayden’s certain she thinks is helpful. “There’s a second one trending too. Uh…” she glances back down at her phone before looking back up at Hayden with a smile. “‘BrothersInSticks.’”
I leave that locker room for 15 goddamn minutes.
“I don’t…” He swallows, turning to Wilson the lump and immediately accepting yet again that nobody is coming to save him. “I wasn’t aware of any, uh, viral hashtags. There were some conversations in the locker room about, you know, concern for everyone’s safety, since we do fly a lot and… uh, yeah, just want everyone to be okay, so we can all play our best.”
“Well, it sounds like there were some significant concerns raised,” says a third reporter – the combover guy Shane hates. “Missing oxygen masks? Pressure for pilots to fly in unsafe conditions?”
“What about the claims that airlines look the other way when contraband is smuggled into cargo holds?” asks Viral Hashtag Lady.
“Yes,” Combover exclaims. “What kind of contraband? Weapons? Flammable substances?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Hayden sees Wilson sit up straight in his seat. For a second, he feels a tiny bit of relief, thinking Wilson can spit some facts from whatever weird documentary he watched and take this fiasco off Hayden’s hands.
Wilson clears his throat and leans forward intently. “Reptiles,” he intones into the microphone, looking around the room before nodding decisively and retreating to his slouch.
Reptiles? What kind of ridiculous documentary would claim that airlines are letting reptiles be snuck onto-
Oh.
Oh, shit.
Hayden looks at Wilson again, and… no, he’s absolutely dead serious.
(He’s glad the Centaurs are okay, if only so he can casually use ‘dead’ again without feeling like an asshole.
Incidentally, it’s at least slightly possible that that is exactly what Wilson is about to be.)
Hayden closes his jaw, which involuntarily went slack at some point, holds up a finger to indicate he needs a second, and leans toward Wilson as he covers the mic with his hand. “Dude, what the actual fuck are you talking about?”
Wilson shrugs. “It was filmed, Pike.”
Hayden tries to make himself count to ten like Jackie insists when the kids are getting on his last nerve, barely makes it to three, and retorts as quietly as he can muster, “Wilson. That is the plot of Snakes on a Plane.”
Another shrug. “Yeah.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not. Of course you’re not. That’s great.”
(This is how it ends, Hayden’s sure of it. He’s going to have a heart attack right here and they’ll have to carry him out in a body bag.
Honestly, he’ll take it if the universe guarantees to surround him with fewer idiots in his next life.)
He takes yet another futile deep breath. “Wilson, please tell me you did not goad our team into publicly accusing a bunch of airlines and charter companies of… committing crimes because of fucking Snakes on a Plane.”
Wilson turns to him then, and… what the fuck, does he look offended? “It’s based on a true story!”
(Where is the chest pain he was promised? Why is this heart attack taking so long to happen?)
Hayden truly doesn’t know how he hasn’t flipped the table already. “It absolutely is not. Oh my god, dude, surely you cannot be this fucking stupid.”
Wilson bristles, and Hayden assumes he’s about to protest the accusation of stupidity – but all Wilson says, with an expression so stern it borders on scary, is “Don’t call me Shirley.” Then he gets up and exits the room, leaving Hayden alone at the table.
When Hayden looks back at the reporters, they’re all talking to one another in what seems like disbelief and frantically typing or scribbling notes.
(It seems the mic wasn’t quite as well covered as he’d thought.
Fan-fucking-tastic.)
Veronique finally decides to put Hayden out of his misery – though he’s convinced she’s been enjoying this, the sadist – and he slinks out of the room. The locker room is empty, although if his social media alerts are to be believed, wherever his teammates disappeared off to still involves a lot of tweeting.
His phone vibrates in his hand, two short buzzes indicative of a text. Shane. All good. Ilya appreciates you jumping in to get me out of there and he wanted you to have proof of life.
Five seconds later, he receives a screenshot from a FaceTime call. Shane is in the lower right corner with a relieved smile and – it’s hard to see from an image so small, but those might be dried tear tracks. (If they are, Hayden gets it.) The rest of the photo is Rozanov, who has red-rimmed eyes and looks utterly exhausted, but is nonetheless grinning triumphantly… oh, and holding up his middle finger to the camera, no doubt as a Hayden-specific greeting. What a gem of a human.
Hayden snorts in spite of himself, closing the text window and opening his rideshare app. It’s good he happens to have his own hotel room tonight; the amount of screaming into a pillow he’s about to do might be the tiniest bit disruptive to others.
***
Two days later, the goddamn hashtags are still trending, but Hayden knows it just needs to run its course. (He turns off all his social media notifications anyway.) He’s finally back home, they’ve just put the kids to bed, and he’s filling Jackie in on the details; she’s laughing so hard he’s starting to worry about her oxygen level.
“I can’t…” She dissolves into yet another fit of what can only be described as cackles. “He really thought-“ And again, this time the pitch of her laughter approaching something only audible to canines.
Eventually she wipes her eyes and blows out a big breath. “Oh my god, Hayden. I knew a lot of hockey players were dumb, but this is next-level.”
He shrugs, pulling his legs up next to him on the couch and tipping over until he’s lying down with his head in Jackie’s lap. “I don’t know if shit like this is training me for later in parenthood, or if experience as a father kept me calm enough to not kill all of them.”
“I’d say swear jar, but you’ve earned a pass just this once,” Jackie decides, hand coming up to rest in Hayden’s hair. “By the way, all the WAGs want to have a Snakes on a Plane movie night.”
“No.”
“Very much yes.” She grins, fingertips absently massaging his scalp, which… fuck, does that feel good. “Did I tell you Nicole Drapeau wants to make T-shirts that say ‘it’s based on a true story’ with a Voyageurs logo and a picture of Samuel L. Jackson?”
(Jesus Christ, that’s… okay, fine, it’s actually genius.
Maybe they can order an extra one for Rozanov, this is the kind of shit he loves.
Not that Hayden is thinking that hard about doing anything nice for his best friend’s obnoxious boyfriend.)
“She deserves a better husband,” Hayden murmurs. “Pat lied to her about caring when he missed that dance recital.”
“Oh, she knows.” Jackie shrugs. “She takes everything he has to say with like… an entire salt lick.”
“Isn’t that kind of sad?”
“Hey, not everyone is lucky enough to be married to an oversharing self-taught king of improv.” Hayden squeezes his eyes shut with a groan, and she laughs. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell them that’s how this all started.”
He turns onto his back so he’s looking up at her. “This all started because fucking Rozanov’s team decided to get on a plane that burst into flames midair, and I didn’t want Shane to have a breakdown in front of a bunch of assholes who already sort of hate him for being gay.”
“Mmm. You say tomato.” They sit in silence for a few moments before the corner of Jackie’s mouth begins to curl upward. “Do you know I had the biggest crush on Colin Mochrie when I was a kid?”
Hayden’s upright before he even realizes he’s moved. “The bald guy?! He’s like a thousand years old.”
Jackie nods nonchalantly. “He has soulful eyes.”
(Cool, cool. So he learned to bail his friend out of an emotional crisis and unwittingly start a social media revolution from an ancient bald guy with soulful eyes.
What the fuck even is Hayden’s life anymore?)
Next to him, two short buzzes burst from his phone, and he reaches for it, expecting the text to be from Shane.
Instead, it’s from Rozanov, whose number he threatens to delete at least twice a week. It’s hard to tell what’s happening in the photo – there are a ton of little lights in the background washing out the object in the center – but Jackie has leaned over by then to look and she gasps. “Hayd, zoom in. Right there.”
As soon as he does, he sees it: a familiar Russian Orthodox cross on a chain, next to which is a black and gold ring.
“Holy shit.”
“Swear jar is back in effect,” Jackie lightly chastises.
“Put it on my tab. Are we sure it’s not just, like, a random ring?”
“Oh, that’s one hundred percent an engagement ring,” she says confidently. “Those lights are probably, like, candles or something. Oh my god, that’s so romantic.”
Hayden considers this for a second. “So Rozanov got himself a ring too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he must’ve gotten one for Shane, right, if he proposed, so…”
Jackie looks thoughtful. “I don’t think Ilya was the one who proposed, sweetie.”
“But…” Hayden’s honestly confused as shit. “Then why wouldn’t Shane tell me?”
“Maybe because this is Ilya’s way of thanking you?”
“For what?”
“For having Shane’s back.” Jackie smiles. “Let’s be real, Hayden. We know Shane pretty well, right?”
He nods.
“So, it’s fair to say he’s downplaying how much of an asshole everyone on your team is being toward him right now.”
“JJ’s okay,” Hayden interjects. “And, uh, swear jar.”
“Aww, honey, that’s so cute,” Jackie snorts. “But childbirth means I’m permanently exempt. Anyway, Ilya isn’t stupid, and he obviously knows Shane pretty well too – so I’m guessing whatever he’s being told is about a tenth of what’s actually happening. And… you know, you’re making it safe for the love of his life when he can’t be there. He’s probably just grateful for that.”
“Oh.” Hayden’s never thought about it like that. “You might be right.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Might be?”
“You’re always right. About this and everything. Forever.”
“That’s better.” She grins and stands up. “I’m going to start the dishwasher and go to bed. Don’t stay up too late.”
Hayden unlocks his phone and looks at the photo again. I guess congratulations are in order? he types.
The response comes a minute or so later. Yes. Thank you.
What are all those lights?
Shane bought every electric candle in three provinces.
Hayden can’t stop himself from smiling at that one. Wow. Didn’t know he had it in him. He hits send before really thinking about it and-
Want to know what else he has in him?
“Ugh,” Hayden says aloud with a shudder. (Although, to be fair: he set himself up for that one.) No thanks. And please never ever say that like ever again. But… seriously, congrats. Happy for you both.
Thank you. The iMessage ellipsis continues to move across the text window. So you’re glad I’m not dead?
Hayden smiles. Yes, and I think you’re good for each other.
It’s a couple minutes before Rozanov replies. I appreciate you.
(Wow.)
Hayden’s legitimately moved, and is trying to formulate a response when his phone buzzes again.
Fifteenth-best brother in sticks.
Hayden tosses his phone to the opposite couch cushion, shaking his head.
Is Ilya Rozanov an asshole? Yes. And he makes Shane happy.
At the end of the day, Hayden reasons, that’s the only point that matters.