Work Text:
1 - Luca Haas
When Luca Haas spoke to his teammates about the sort of shit he had gotten up to with teammates back in Switzerland as a teenager, he got the impression that they were silently, subtly judging him. It was easier for them, he thought, to pretend that Luca was the younger version of Shane Hollander - neurotic, devoted to hockey, quiet and anxious and shy. The Luca Haas who partied and drank and smoked weed in skate parks with his friends was not the Luca Haas that they were very well acquainted with, nor was the Luca Haas that they wanted to get to know.
This was why Luca was currently, quietly seething at Wyatt Hayes - because Wyatt was just as bad as the others for making the jokes about little Luca Haas and because Luca was one hundred percent certain that Wyatt (despite the fact they were currently at practice) was tripping balls. Which meant at all of Wyatt’s sanctimonious chidings about Luca smoking weed, informed by his wife’s career, he claimed, were the height of hypocrisy. Luca hated hypocrisy. He was also jealous - he had not found any weed in Ottawa that he liked as much as the stuff he had sampled back in Zurich, and Wyatt was clearly on the good stuff.
Luca looped towards Wyatt as they broke up for a quick hydration break (Roz insisted on these so that he could take whoever was unlucky enough to have invoked his ire that day and give them a cross talking to at the side of the rink), half wondering whether he should ask him outright where he got the shit from or if he was supposed to gradually build his way up to it. They were a close team, and usually Luca would imagine that Wyatt wouldn’t mind getting a harmless question like that, except for the fact that he had been very vocal and humorous in the many ways he managed to tell Luca to “say no to drugs and stay in school.”
So, subtly.
Except -
Wyatt was already talking when Luca drew close to him. The Swiss paused, hovering, unnoticed, a few feet away, and listened to Wyatt Hayes as he spoke to an invisible, anonymous audience. Was he really that high? Luca frowned, observing him.
Wyatt did not seem to notice. Wyatt was still talking. Wyatt, it seemed, was narrating the intense talk that Ilya Rozanov was having with Tanner Dillon despite the fact that Luca was pretty sure there was no conceivable way that Wyatt would be able to hear what was being said from the distance away that they were.
“It would be this conversation,” Wyatt said cheerfully, “that Dillon would think about in ten years time, when he was wondering why he never really accomplished anything in life.”
What the fuck?
Who was Wyatt talking to? Luca looked around them, half thinking that there would be people leaping out at him with video cameras and streamers and yelling that he’d been punked on live television, but there was no one. There was just Luca, Wyatt, and whoever it was that Wyatt was apparently seeing in his drug addled trip. But… Luca had never known weed to hit someone like this.
Maybe, he decided, there was such a thing as too good weed. Maybe, he thought, he was seeing the very first example of this.
Making up his mind, he shuffled as carefully and unobstrusively as he could away. He needn’t have bothered being careful. He doubted that Wyatt would have noticed a herd of stampeding elephants, with how high he apparently was. Luca wasn’t going to get involved. He was the last person who should judge people for their weed habits. God forbid a guy have a hobby these days - even if he was freaked out by seeing Wyatt staring off into space and having some sort of prophetic vision for an invisible audience.
2 - Shane Hollander
Shane Hollander had read a lot of papers about the impacts of head injuries on athletes. He was a hockey player; he’d had his own bell rung before, and he’d heard all the different things that the doctors had told him could have gone wrong if he’d been slightly less lucky. Shane Hollander didn’t like luck - things weren’t lucky or unlucky, they were simply things that you did to get an end result and it either worked out for you or it didn’t. Shane had made his whole career out of doing things for the end result. He’d put his mind to it, bent his will towards his tasks, and it was that - not luck - which had ensured that he had been as successful as he had been.
So, no, he hadn’t trusted the doctors when they had told him that he had been lucky to wake up, and lucky to have all his memories and thought processes and little quirks of personality relatively the same, and lucky not to have been saddled with some unfortunate consequence of his collision, like crippling migraines or worsening eye sight or poor coordination. Clearly, there had been something that had happened that had kept Shane whole, kept him healthy. Luck was not a good enough explanation for him, and he’d started by reading medical articles and papers on his phone or laptop when he had a free moments and then worked his way up to medical textbooks and the likes.
Shane wasn’t an expert or anything - he was a hockey player and had been shit at school and the likes - but he knew enough to keep him worried and to keep him on his toes. Like what CTE could mean for his husband, with Ilya’s inherited risk of early onset dementia, or how delicate the human brain really was when it came down to it.
He knew enough to be worried about Wyatt Hayes, the goaltender for the Ottawa Centaurs. Goalies were like magnets for head injuries and Hayes seemed to attract more of them than most; Shane was pretty sure that Hayes just assumed that his head was as good as his hands when it came to stopping pucks, regardless of the force with which they would be launched at him. He was also pretty sure that the inside of Hayes’ brain also looked a little like an overripe peach, all bruised and lopsided and leaky.
That’s just Hayesy, Ilya had said, laughing, when Shane had brought up his concerns. He’d shook his head, but the gesture had been fondly exasperated rather than despairing. Ilya, despite the meticulous way that Shane laid out evidence, did not see several of the glaring issues that he did. He mostly wrote them off as Hayes’ little oddities - his goalie personality.
But Shane had been collecting his evidence - accidentally at first, mostly just because he’d read so much that he couldn’t help but see head injuries and CTE where there was none. Then it had been less accidentally, because the ‘accidents’ had become so frequent that Shane (although he was not captain, nor even alternate captain) had felt that it was his duty - his responsibility - to worry about Hayes. Because the sort of the stuff he was noticing was concerning - concerning enough that he was still debating whether or not he should go to Terry and the medical team about his worries, or even Doctor Lisa Hayes, if only to know that there was someone more qualified to disregard his worries.
Hayes spaced out a lot. Stared into the middle distance, eyes glazed, looking like he was seeing things that no one else could see. Sometimes, he was so concentrated on whatever it was that it was almost impossible to get his attention without shaking or smacking him.
Which, fine. Ilya said that it was the undiagnosed ADHD. Hayes said that it was just his thought process going a mile a minute. Luca Haas had whispered to Shane, when he had overheard Shane’s worries, that it was weed. Dykstra had claimed that Hayes was clearly just bored and retreating to his mind palace in order to entertain himself.
Shane didn’t think any of that explained why Hayes kept talking to himself.
Shane had noticed it first on the ice, which was not strange enough to immediately make sense of why this had flagged his attention. Shane did not talk to himself on the ice but he knew guys who did, especially in practice. His first captain with the Voyageurs had ran through plays under his breath as he skated. Hayden recited the periodic table of elements backwards. Casey Hicks (a hockey player from Calgary) sang whatever songs had been top of the charts in the 2000s. So, no, he didn’t question it when Hayes muttered to himself on the ice. What he did question was when he overheard Hayes talking to himself in the showers or on the team bus, the one time that they had shared a hotel room before Shane had had to put his foot down and declare never again, in the children’s ward as he played Mario Kart. And - more concerningly - it never seemed to correlate at all to what he was doing. It was mostly incomprehensible.
His breaking point came at one of Bood’s barbecues. He was stood, a bottle of ginger ale held loosely in one hand, only a few feet away from Hayes. He was on his own, Ilya having led a strangely flustered Luca Haas and one of their newer rookies inside the house to ‘talk’, and Hayes was also by himself, with Lisa having beelined towards the WAGs (and Harris).
Wyatt was not acting like he was on his own. Wyatt was chattering away to himself as if he had been set in front of a captive audience, tone bright and engaging and steeped in drama.
No more, Shane decided firmly. No more.
He slid his phone out of his pocket, punching in his pin. Navigating to a web browser, he began to pull up the most insightful articles that he had read about head injuries and athletes. Then he forwarded them all to Hayes, throwing in another article that he had thought read a little basic but was probably easier to digest for someone struggling with the sort of symptoms that Hayes was exhibiting.
Hayes’ phone chimed in his pocket and he fished it out. His brow furrowed as he read, and furrowed further when he looked up at Shane. Unsmiling (this was a serious issue) and forcing himself to maintain unblinking eye contact (this was about connection), Shane forced himself to look supportive. He sent Hayes a thumbs up. Yeah. Yeah, he was pretty sure he was looking supportive.
3 - Nico LaPointe
The thing was, no matter what his teammates thought of him, Nico LaPointe was not illiterate. He read shit - like books and magazines and the ingredients list on the packaging of his food because God forbid a guy needed to fucking prescription glasses to read the teeny tiny print and manage his allergies mindfully. He also read comic books, because he’d liked the efficiency of them as a kid and getting to fill in his reading log three times as fast as the other kids in his class reading Jane Austen or whatever. As an adult, he just liked them - the storylines and the characters and the style of them. So, no, he was not illiterate. He reckoned he was probably one of his only teammates who still read for pleasure - one hour, before bed, always - and was therefore more literate than any one of the fuckers.
This also meant that Nico LaPointe was one of the only people who understood the comic book references that Wyatt Hayes wove liberally through everything conversation he had. Pointy didn’t understand how so many situations in Hayesy’s life reminded him of comic book scenarios, but he at least understood the references that he was trying to make. Like when he had gotten nailed in the head by a book, declared himself amnesiac, and announced that it was his life’s ambition to live in a taxicab and shave himself bald and go by the name of Ric. Pointy had judged him hard for that one.
Pointy had also seen the way that Hayesy nattered onto himself sometimes, mostly when he was in goal and supposed that he was isolated enough from the rest of the team that no one was really paying any attention to him, and had simply thought that it was some kind of bit. Like, Deadpool or something. For fuck’s sake, Pointy had been calling him Pool (he was determined to prove Bergy wrong and come up with a solid nickname for someone at some point) for the last few months, and had assumed that he and Hayesy were now sharing some sort of inside joke because Haysey had looked pleased every single time.
He no longer thought that was what was happening.
Pointy had even meant to walk into whatever the Hell was up with Haysey. All he’d wanted to do was a quiet space to do his morning exercise routine after the private gym in his apartment had been closed for refurb. The gym at the Centaurs’ home rink had been the perfect replacement, so Pointy had gotten up to come in early, deliberately so that there was less chance of running into someone, because he hated exercising with company.
He had not expected Wyatt Hayes to be there. He had not expected Wyatt to be there, alone, and talking to himself. Not yet noticed by the goalie, Pointy hung back on the threshold of the gym, half-hidden by the apparatus between himself and Hayesy, scanning the gym. He wondered, for a moment, if Hayesy was filming some social media thing for Harris, but he could not see any cameras at all.
It was the the water bottle that startled it all. Hayesy’s beloved Spider-man decal-decorated metal water bottle. Except for on the ice, it was never more than a few metres away from the man; he took his hydration very seriously. Hayesy was carrying it now, cradling it in his arms like a babe, as he stepped towards the rowing machine. Pointy watched as, almost in slow motion, the bottle toppled from Hayesy’s hands. The goalie went to catch it, but whatever unnatural ability he had for catching violent slapshots in the palm of his gloves had clearly deserted him. All he succeeded in doing was slapping the water bottle, sending it arcing through the air to crash to the gym floor and skitter away.
“That,” Hayesy announced, voice deadpan and very much fucking done, “is the sort of thing I can expect for being productive on a Monday. Remember, procrastination is the best medicine.”
Hayesy addressed all of this to the empty fucking wall of the gym. Pointy stared at it, trying desperately to see anything that would suggest that Hayesy was not just talking to him, but there was nothing. There was fucking no one there. No one there to talk to - and definitely no one there to receive Hayesy’s Deadpool bit with the glee that Pointy had. Which meant that it wasn’t a bit. And the way that Hayesy had said it… Pointy didn’t think that it was just a harmless case of talking to oneself, a muttered quip here or there. Hayesy’s tone almost seemed to invite a reply, leaving a space where the expected the lonely silence to respond to him.
Pointy held up his hands, a universal gesture of surrender. Whatever the fuck was going on, he didn’t want to be involved. He began, slowly and silently, to back out of the gym, thanking all the gods above that Hayesy had not seen him. He’d go to Luca’s, see if Haasy would let him use the gym in his apartment complex. Fuck, he’d go to Roz and Hollander’s before he went anywhere in that gym (and Pointy was still terrified of Hollander). Somewhat hysterically, Pointy wondered if Hayesy also had the ability to regrow his limbs, and he wondered if there would be a safe way to test that - because, holy fucking shit, either Wyatt Hayes was Deadpool and batshit odd, or he was simply odd.
+1 - The Monologue
“- and with that, the Ottawa Centaurs have won the Stanley Cup for the first time in their history! Absolutely legendary scenes!”
The buzzer that announced the end of seasons upon seasons of toil was tinny, impersonal and a little anti-climatic. It was not, really, the moment that the Stanley Cup transferred itself into the waiting hands of the Centaurs - that moment had been the moment when Haasy had curved a ridiculously impossible shot past Toronto’s goalie and into the top corner of the net, dragging them finally out of the draw that had threatened their cup chances.
The celebration was immediate and effusive. Luca was mobbed almost immediately - first by Pointy, then by the other rooks (none of them were, really, rookies anymore, but the name stuck), then by the players who began dogpiling onto the ice from the bench. Only a few feet away, Ilya Rozanov was grappling his husband down onto the ground into a truly filthy kiss - reciprocated eagerly by Shane, who had been surprisingly intense in his desire to overshadow Scott Hunter’s 2016 Stanley Cup celebrations. Some people were crying, trying to hide into the crooks of their elbows or their gloves; Bood was weeping openly, sounding like he was dying as he choked on his own, heartbroken, sobbing breaths.
Wyatt Hayes drifted away from the crowds, face blank and seeming to exist in a state of shock. He drifted very close to one of the cameras trained on the ice, cutting in front of the shot. The camera operator shifted a little uncomfortably, feeling the prickle of Hayes’ attention and wondering if they should offer their congratulations or something. They were supposed to a silent, unseen presence behind the broadcast - but Hayes was so intense.
“And with that,” said Hayes, seeming both to stare directly at the camera and past it at the same time, towards some unknowable and unseen point, “the Ottawa Centaurs won the long game. This, and the next three seasons, would be the high points of our careers and would truly cement us as a hockey dynasty. After that, we’d go our separate ways - bound by what we’d been through together, kept together by the invisible ties of brotherhood.”
The camera operator took a tiny step back. They felt like they were watching the end of an old coming of age movie, freeze frame focusing on every player as the portents of their future were unravelled. Hayes was oblivious to this, carried away as he monologued.
“This would be Luca Haas’ final season with the Ottawa Centaurs. The three years of his ELC had ended and he would be traded to the New York Admirals to flourish under the teaching hands of Scott Hunter. When the Centaurs’ success trailed away, Luca would bring his new team to even greater heights. The other rookies - LaPointe and Young - would also be scattered across the continent, to fresh starts in new team, over the coming seasons. Out of their quartet, Bergy alone would remain. Eventually, he would become captain of the Centaurs, settling down in Ottawa and becoming a family man, on and off the ice.
“It would also be Evan Dykstra’s last season. A drunken Stanley Cup celebration would convince him that it was time to hang up the skates and pick up his cowboy hat, beginning anew the country music carer he had abandoned in the garage of his teenage best friend. Evan would never be chart-topping successful, but he was famous enough to be a celebrity feature on a critically ignored sitcom and future cult classic.
“Zane Boodram would last another three seasons before opening up his barbeque restaurant and focusing on his family. Nick Choniaurd would retire the season after and become a YouTube sebastian for his daily vlogs. Tanner Dillon never learnt, really, how to connect his passes and faded into obscurity. In ten years, he’ll start a podcast.
“Troy Barrett and Harris Drover get married. Barrett goes onto a career of activism and keynote speeches, and is mostly universally beloved. He accomplishes a lot of good things for the world, and also gets the hang of Instagram - allegedly. It’s common knowledge that it’s probably Harris operating his social media accounts. It’s uncertain if Barrett knows he’s on TikTok.
“Ilya Rozanov retires two seasons after this, citing the desire to start a family. This does not happen then, but he does adopt several more dogs and a geriatric cat with cataracts called Scottie. The season after, Shane Hollander also retires. It’s not the same playing hockey without his husband, he claims, which is easy to say when your husband will never have the same number of Stanley Cups as you. They’ll have two children together, and will be regarded as two of the most successful hockey players to ever hit the ice.
“As for me,” Wyatt intoned, inhaling a deep breath as he drew his monologue to its final conclusion, spreading his hands in a gesture of wordless humbleness, “well, that’s a whole other story. I -”
The portent of Hayes’ future was cut off as Mattias Holmeberg leapt onto his back, shaking him back and forth by the shoulders as he screeched directly in Hayes’ ear. He reached a pitch of unholy shrillness, and that seemed enough to break Hayes out of whatever lull had seized him before. He laughed, and turned towards where his team were, letting himself be dragged forwards. A moment later, and he was swallowed in the vivid, nearby presentness of it all.