Chapter Text
The walled garden is sweltering at this time of year. The sun beats down, bouncing off the red brick walls and reflecting straight onto the back of Fraser's neck.
He swats at a fly that's been buzzing around him since he spilled his coffee down his front earlier that morning and sits back on his heels, surveying the mammoth task still in front of him.
The thick black weed barrier is just a degree short of burning his knees where he sits, cutting open little holes for his latest crop of plants ready to go in the ground.
His greyhound—Jessie—sits to his left, her mottled grey fur dappled in the sunlight filtering through the apple trees above.
"You okay?" He murmurs in her direction, unable to help the smile on his lips as she flops her head back into the grass, rolling slightly onto her back until her legs stretch almost straight up into the air.
The radio on his other side is murmuring something about the heatwave, and he tunes it out while he continues digging holes.
It's around the time he decides to break for something to eat and some water that he catches the news about Connor.
"And in other news on this beautiful Chicago summer day, Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks is reported to be having shoulder surgery this week, with a projected recovery time of four months or longer, leaving him out of hockey for the foreseeable. After another year of disappointment with the Hawks, could this spell a change in geography once he's back on the ice? Now back to…"
Fraser's stomach sinks.
Him and Connor had grown up around each other, he'd even considered them friends at one point or another. And then he'd dropped the projected career all the scouts had promised him and turned his attention towards a community that didn't make him feel like he had to change everything about himself in order to survive.
That felt a little unfair to Connor, he had never made Fraser feel like that. No, Connor had been one of the few people who'd seen him for who he was and not batted an eye.
In hockeys defence—and there weren't many—he had known. He had been told from the moment he touched the ice that hockey was not the sport for sensitive dispositions or boys who liked boys and that he'd need to toughen up in order to make it to the show.
That was sort of the problem, he'd discovered in his teenage years. Where his friends and teammates were obsessive to almost the point of compulsion about doing what it took to make it, Fraser found increasingly that his view of the whole thing soured with every screamed insult from his coach and every homophobic comment directed at who had been deemed to have let the side down that night.
And if his mother, God rest her soul, had taught him anything, it was that life was too short to do things you didn't enjoy for the approval of people you didn't respect.
All of that is to say, when he finally made the call to hang up his skates for the purposes of making it to the NHL, pretty much everyone he knew and considered a friend slowly dropped off his radar until eventually it was like he'd never even played hockey at all.
For the most part, Connor had been included in that catchal.
Sometimes—when he couldn't sleep and thoughts of 'what if' plagued him—he wondered what it would have been like if he'd stuck it out. Things were different now, almost ten years on. Crosby had come out, Malkin by his side as he shocked the world—although probably not their teammates—with news of their decade-long relationship.
And then because that's how these things work, Crosby had come out and the rest of the domino's had fallen. Thirty of the thirty-two teams now had out players, and Gary Bettman was a thing of the not so distant past, archaic thinking gone with him.
Still, just because it was "okay to be gay" in the show now, doesn't mean it would have gone that way for Fraser—he knows that. It also wasn't a good enough reason for him to spend too much time thinking about it.
There was more to his decision than just his sexuality. Granted, that was the biggest factor, but there were other more sinister things at work, things he'd hidden from his parents, the kind of things he worried would send his gravely ill mother into cardiac arrest everytime he came home from practice.
He'd buried those memories though, tucked neatly away in a box in the back of his brain, roses and ivy wrapping around it until it was almost like it wasn't there at all.
Jessie follows him towards the glass house propped up against the ancient walls, the heat a wall as he wandered inside to find a mug.
"Get out of here you idiot, it's too hot for dogs in here," he muttered, shooing her out the door, her big jaw open and panting.
Through one of the dilapidated wooden doors, lay an old apple store. It was blessedly cool in there, if a little dusty and home to more spiders than he could count.
Still, it offered restbite from the scorching sun, and a cooler spot for Jessie to collapse down in a heap, desperate to be wherever he was at any given time.
"You're silly, you know that?" He says to her, smiling as she perks up when he reaches into his bag to pull out his lunch.
The ham sandwich and carrot sticks with hummus where the remainder of what he had left in the fridge this morning, rushing out the door with barely a thought in order to beat the heat.
Jessie inches closer, long nose resting on the tip of his knee with a hopeful look in her eye.
As is their routine, he ploughs through lunch, hungrier than he realised and tears off a bite of sandwich for her to wolf down like she didn't have her breakfast only a few hours ago.
He looks at the pile of rubbish in the corner of the apple store, makes a mental note to research the cost of hiring a trailer to take it to the dump and pours himself a cup of coffee from his flask.
It's while he's sipping the hot beverage that his mind drifts to Connor.
They'd more or less kept in contact, although it was mainly Fraser's doing. When Connor got drafted, he'd sent him a text to say congratulations, not expecting much of a response on the biggest day of the boys life so far.
He'd been pleasantly surprised to get a response later that night, even more so when Connor mentioned seeing that he'd moved to the same city Connor was now being drafted to.
It seemed a little serendipitous, all things considered.
How he'd ended up in Chicago still felt like a bit of a mystery to him. The English walled garden tucked inside the Chicago Botanic Gardens was coveted within the gardening community.
His mother had been the one with the fascination with all things English countryside, and it was her legacy that had led him there. He'd always felt torn between that world and the one he was thrust into via hockey.
Her garden had always allowed him a soft space to land, somewhere to breath in and out without the crushing weight of expectations sitting on his chest. Her garden was where he'd learned how to love and nurture things beyond himself, where he'd learned the true cost of laziness and the joy and beauty of how from his hands, something with such immense beauty could grow.
When she died, he'd been so lost. He'd not known which way was up or how he was expected to just go on with his life with half of it missing. By that time, hockey was over, and he'd chosen not to reach out to anyone in the end, the loss not something he knew how to talk about when it was so fresh.
But he'd always had the garden, her lifeblood running through it in the bees and the butterflies and the forget-me-knots fighting their way through the undergrowth that couldn't be tamed.
When he'd applied for the assistant gardener post in Chicago, he'd thought it was a reach, he had no formal training, no degree to speak of, and no concept of the undertaking it would require.
And yet, they'd invited him for an interview. All he'd had to speak of was his mothers garden, of his childhood afternoons spent thinning out seed beds and deadheading rose bushes. That had apparently been enough, and at the tender age of eighteen, he moved away from home, saying goodbye to his father and sister, and promised his mother he would do her proud.
That had been eight years ago, and he liked to think he'd kept his promise. He enrolled as a mature student in English language and literature at the University of Chicago, balancing his classes with being at the garden.
Jessie had come to him sort of by accident. He'd agreed to go on a date with a guy from his course, happily agreeing to meet at the local dog shelter to walk them. The date had been a bust, Jake had used pretty words but what he was actually saying lacked any real substance, and Fraser had instead found himself totally enamoured with Jessie the three-year-old greyhound.
She'd come home with him a week later.
He looks at his watch, conscious that he needs to cut the agreed number of stems for the bouquets being collected later that afternoon for the exhibition they were having in the main house.
His finger hovers over Connor's contact, the last time he'd text him he'd not gotten a response.
But then he remembers the pressure foisted upon Connor's shoulders, and the countless pundits around the world calling him washed for being locked into a team that wouldn't know a rebuild if it smacked them in the face.
He'd kept apprised of Connor's career over the years, had seen every time he'd gone down with a injury and been out of the season, had resisted the urge to offer his apologies before on account of the fact Connor didn't suffer that stuff well.
Still, Fraser wasn't sure how many people Connor had around him down here that he could rely on, and four months was a long time, even if it was the off-season.
"Hey bud, heard the news about your shoulder, that's shit dude. Not sure what your rehab looks like but I'm in the walled garden most days if you wanted to get out of the house some time. No pressure though, I know you'll still have training to do. Fraser"
He stares at the block of text in front of him, and before he can think better of it, presses send. The little blue line holds across the top of his screen, before it reads delivered.
Fraser pockets it, resolves to not think too hard about the olive branch he's extended and sets a timer to remind him to switch off the irrigation in the glass house before heading back out into the sun, birds chirping around him.
Connor is watching reels when the message pops through his Do Not Disturb.
He pauses what he's watching, pulls down on the message so he can look at it without really looking at it, and squashes the urge to roll his eyes.
He's sick of the pity he's getting from everyone, sick of the down turned lips and the tilts of people's heads and the constant fucking apologies everyone feels the need to bestow upon him as if it's their fault his season is ruined and his shoulder is fucked.
He reads the text again.
Fraser, incidentally, has omitted the well meaning apology for his injury, and Connor feels a twinge of guilt for thinking the worst of someone who has only ever shown him kindness.
Still, he's not sure why Fraser seems to think that being in a garden is going to help with his recovery, and he know's he's not stupid enough to invite him there to do some work.
He ponders the question while he looks through the notifactions that are stacked behind his DND, a few from Frank, one from his mother and three from his sister asking if he's left the house this week, but he eventually leaves them unanswered, going back to his and Fraser's text thread.
"If you want to get out of the house some time," like Fraser thinks he's some kind of shut in, like he's some kind of child that can't make decisions about his own mental well-being.
The more he thinks about it, the more annoyed he gets. It was alright for Fraser, with his perfect life and his cute dog and parents who didn't pile expectations on him like bodies on a totem pole.
He throws his phone into the couch and looks at the bag by the door, ready to be collected by Frank in the morning when he drives him to surgery.
His apartment is a state, meal plan having taken a back seat to his need for take out and tiramisu to quell the unending anxiety of his upcoming surgery. His washing has made it as far as the washing machine, but he's yet to actually run the cycle, and his bed sheets are starting to smell a little too much like his hockey bag that hasn't been emptied since he got back from Vancouver.
He grabs his phone again on his way to bed, opening the search bar on instagram and clicks the most recent search.
Fraser posts fairly consistently, pictures of the garden, stacks of books in a dimly lit apartment and the occasional cup of coffee in what looks like the university library.
Mostly, it's pictures of Jessie. Connor smiles at the latest one, she's sat under a tree in the bright sunshine, grinning with her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. Fraser had captioned it "would you believe she has ample shade available to her?"
Connor can't help the snort that escapes him, Fraser had always said he was easily amused. He tries not to think about how that wasn't quite as true as it once was and rolls over to go to sleep.