Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing about hockey is that you have to do it all again. Every year, the same cycle. The same teams, the same opponents, the same game. Somehow, you would think it might get old, but it never does. Only the roster ever changes.

Matthew Buckley is traded, and so is Adam Linsky. Over the summer, Augustin Berenger re-signs with the Aces, but his higher salary means that the team does not pursue a contract extension with Nils Herlovsen. There are new additions: Tyler Greenwall and a goalie traded last year from Montreal named Elias Landvik are pulled up to the main roster for good, a new defenceman, William Poindexter, is signed out of Samwell University, and they draft a new forward tenth overall, Jeremiah Jansing, with a pick nabbed from the Islanders two years ago.

The Aces lose players, but they get new ones. They lose games, but not that many. And they become the best team in the NHL.

Oh, to be back right where you started, all over again.

The night before playoffs begin, Augustin Berenger can’t sleep. He stands at the window of Kent’s apartment, staring at the cars passing by on the street below. It’s quiet somehow, an anomaly in a city which never really sleeps. New York holds the official title, but Vegas’ nightlife is an entirely different beast. New York brings daytime into the night. Vegas is a night that never ends

It’s strange to fall in love with a city you once thought you would never call home. It’s strange to fall in love with a person you used to despise. Life is filled with remarkably strange things.

Kent’s arms looping around his waist aren’t a surprise. He sleeps here in Kent’s apartment more often than he does at his own place. Jem, their newest rookie, likes to joke that he basically has the apartment to himself. The truth is that Kent doesn’t have a rookie this year, so there’s no one for them to wake up with…accidental antics.

“Hey,” Kent says, breath ghosting Augustin’s ear as his chin perches on Augustin’s shoulder, “Can’t sleep?”

“No,” Augustin replies. How can he sleep? He can feel something humming in the air, a sort of promise that only comes around once a year. Children get Christmas morning. Twenty-seven-year-old hockey players get two months of this. The Aces finished second in the League, first in the West, and it’s not like last year when nobody expected anything from them. Everyone expects everything.

And he fucking wants it. The hunger growls in his stomach, sends shocks along his limbs, gnaws away at his heart in the absence of victory to chew on. He needs to give it what it wants, or soon there will be nothing left of him. This is the year.

Kent kisses his neck, “If you don’t sleep, you’re going to be tired tomorrow.”

“I’m never tired,” Augustin lies, and Kent makes a face as he follows Augustin back to the bedroom, “and you stole my T-shirt, you dick.”

Kent looks down at Augustin’s Memorial Cup shirt, which sags around his frame and has a gaping hole in the collar, “Get me a Cup, and I’ll give you a new shirt.”

It’s as good enough incentive as any.

They wake the next morning, and when Augustin breathes in the familiar scent of ice and skate-safe floor, he thinks: let’s fucking do it again.

“Berenger up the boards, dumps it in, Parson’s right there with him, Parson picks up the puck, passes across to Berenger- SCORES! Augustin Berenger opens the scoring, and the Aces are up by one.”

They fucking do it again, and that starts with a win.

Kent wishes he could say that this year feels different from all the other years, but it doesn’t.

The adrenaline is the same, the fire and fury he throws kerosene on in the dressing room and between periods. Sweat drips onto the floor and hits with the same light splattering sound. The crunch of body and huff of breath as they rocket around the rink is just like any regulation game from juniors to beer league. They’re all playing the same game.

He would fight to win a nickel and a bottle cap, or a round of beer. He would fight to win just to say that he did. Now, he’s fighting for the greatest prize that has ever been put on this earth: thirty-four and a half pounds of metal, but the game still feels exactly the same.

The game never changes. Only the result.

“Parson takes the puck into the zone, dodges one- two- THREE- SCORES! WHAT A GOAL! We’re witnessing Kent Parson in his prime, ladies and gentlemen, he’s just getting better and better. What a treat to watch.”

This time, they win.

Kevin Mitsuya has been an Ace for exactly a year and three months when he straps his gear on for Game 3 of the first round.

He knew when he was first drafted that he was never going to be a household name. He was okay with that. His parents had raised him to be humble and to be grateful for what he has. Sometimes, it seems counterintuitive to the cutthroat nature of their sport, but Kevin’s not playing for money or fame. He’s playing because this is hockey, and it’s the thing that he loves more than anything.

He hadn’t loved it any less in the minors, hadn’t loved it any less in juniors. His mother gave up on getting him to finish school after his first and only year at the University of Wisconsin, because he wanted to get out and play, to breathe and eat and sleep the game with nothing else to distract him, but he would have loved it in university too. But this is it. This is the big leagues, the show, this is all of it. He doesn’t need to be a household name. He’s too busy breathing in the best hockey in the world for as long as possible.

He’s a solid fourth-line producer, maybe third in a couple of years, but it doesn’t matter how many minutes you play if you win the Cup. Houston wasn’t going to be there for years, but Kevin was willing to wait for his chance with them. Vegas wasn’t his choice, but the Aces are his family now just as much as the Aeros had been back when he was drafted.

He has this ritual before games, one he ported over from Texas. Part of it involves barbecued brisket, but part of it involves something a little more spiritual. He stands by the rink door and slaps his stick against everyone’s pads as they get off the ice after the warm up, like he can somehow share in the vibrating energy they all have. He’s a jack of all trades, so he likes to think it rubs off on him: Parse’s speed, Augustin’s sight, Swoops’ grit, Petal’s acceleration. It means that he has to be the last one on the ice, a superstition that Parse shares.

“Quit acting like he’s going to behead you. You could step on him. Do you want me to ask?” Augustin had asked dryly when he meekly brought it up before his first game. Kevin had shaken his head furiously.

“No, I can…I’ll ask myself.”

“Why?” Parse had said when he asked nervously if he could be the last off after warmups. Kevin’s throat had been as dry as a desert back then, when he had been an Ace for exactly thirty-eight hours and spent a sizable percentage of those hours flirting with Kent’s little sister. It wasn’t just anybody he was asking. It was Kent Parson, who set record after record, the best American player in the world bar none, his captain. Who was he, some no-name kid from the Pacific Northwest with less than a season under his belt, to ask for anything like this?

“Oh, sure,” was all Parse said after he explained, and Kevin got his pre-game ritual.

He does it for this game, just like all the rest of them. Smack. Wally’s willpower. Smack. Flicker’s passing. Smack. Dex’s intensity.

Parse comes skating up to him once everyone else is off the ice. Sometimes, Kevin wonders if this is going to be the day that Parse wants his pre-game ritual back, but Parse just offers his left leg, and then his right. Smack. Smack.

“Let’s fucking do this, Mitsuya,” he says, and Kevin follows him into the tunnel.

”Mitsuya absolutely flying up the ice, slings it across to Jansing, Jansing drops it back to Poindexter- SCORES! Beautiful direction of the play by Kevin Mitsuya, a rocket by William Poindexter, and the Aces are up by two.”

This time last year, they were already moving on.

All hockey players have omens, portents, superstitions. They almost made it last year, and so some of them huddle in groups and whisper that maybe if they don’t win in four, if they let the Sharks win just one, it will mean that everything will be different. It will mean that they might win. The whispers spread in the form of jokes and sarcastic comments, bouncing around the tunnels and buses.

Nobody really takes it seriously, but they’re all thinking it, and maybe that’s why their shots only hit padding, and the struggling Sharks manage one goal towards the end of a scoreless game. The room is dead silent when they all get off after the buzzer rings and sends them back home for Game Five.

It’s Augustin who breaks the silence because Kent’s too angry to even speak, “If any of you ever fucking psyche yourselves out like this again, I will dismember each and every one of you with my bare fucking hands. Ca va?”

There’s a general grumble of assent.

When they first signed William Poindexter, Kent was sure that it was going to be a problem.

For the first few months of the season, Dex treated him with polite distance. He didn’t have trouble making friends, especially with Mitty and Smitty, but Kent’s sure that the Samwell alum’s heard some things from the so-called Bad Times that keep him at arm’s length. He even considers texting Bittle about it, and Augustin forcibly confiscates his phone for twenty-four hours until his brief bout of insanity leaves him.

It’s hard to stop being captain once you start.

Dex is a good kid missing half of himself, as all defencemen inevitably do when they first join a new team. He blew the coaches away during pre-season camp and surprised everybody by making the roster, but he plays as though he’s missing a third arm. He’s adapted since the season started, playing with Cross on the second line so that he has a guiding hand, but there are still glimpses of the ghosts. And he doesn't really meet Kent's eyes.

But then they played Providence, and when Dex had joined him and Jack at center ice, Jack had grinned and said, “You having a good time, frog?”

“Hey, don’t call my rookie a frog.” Kent had retorted. “That is vaguely bigoted, and also Dex isn’t French. You’re lucky Gus isn’t here to deck you.”

“It’s fine, Parse,” Dex grinned, “Frog just means freshman. Guess I am one again, but I’m still going to give you a run for your money, Zimmermann.”

“Yeah, well, I should hope so,” Jack had said before he skated away, “You’re learning from the best. He fought hard to get you.”

Dex had blinked at the retreating blue back, and then at Kent, and the smile that had peeled across his face made Kent smile too. He had fought hard for them to sign Samwell’s captain; persuading scouts to look closely at Samwell’s defensive prospects as well as the forward they wanted in Connor Whisk, convincing the head office to give the kid a shot at a development camp. Maybe it’s not the Samwell captain that everyone thought might play for the Aces, but Kent knows what it means to earn something.

The confetti has long since stopped falling onto the ice, and the handshake line is over. Kent waits near the bench as the redhead and the Sharks third-string goalie, Chris Chow, exchange a long, tearful embrace at center ice while the rest of the Sharks slink off. Chow is crying unabashedly, and Dex knocks their foreheads together carefully, patting Chow gently on the cheek as he says something that nobody can hear.

Kent hopes that Dex is telling Chow the truth: that it was a miracle that he kept the team from getting swept by the Aces for the second year in a row. The kid stood on his head when both regular goalies ended up injured and his team gave up two games before he did. He’s gonna go far. Kent’s truly terrified to play him after he’s had a couple of years in the AHL to improve.

“You okay?” He asks Dex as the redhead approaches. Hoots of celebrations are bouncing up through the tunnel, but Dex’s smile is pained.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s never been particularly forthcoming to Kent, far preferring to talk to Cross. “I just wish…”

Kent pats him on the back as he trails off. There are dozens of people he wishes he could have done this with: seasons worth of old Aces, friends from Rimouski who just didn’t cut it in the big leagues, Jack, even some of the kids from his teams before he ever ended up in the Q. It’s a hard truth to learn, that not everyone can win. “I know. But hey, listen. We’re going to do it, okay?”

Dex’s red brows flatten, and his teeth bare themselves into a grin, “Hell yeah we are.”

Colorado is a much tougher opponent in the second round than Anaheim could have ever been, and a third of the way through the game, Augustin’s legs are already screaming. He’s skating himself into the ground, almost to the brink of injury, and it’s only the fact that his ribs still ache when he breathes too fast or deep that keeps him from pushing harder.

It was not so long ago that he was invincible. Now, the constant strain is starting to take its toll on his body in ways he only used to imagine in nightmarish, career-ending scenarios. He’s already scheduled to have surgery over the summer to fix his rotator cuff before the wear and tear gets to its breaking point, and now he actually has to remind himself to turn off the jets instead of chasing that high of adrenaline up and down the ice.

They’re going to lose today, not for lack of trying. Colorado comes out of the gate hungry after a bitter series against the Flames, and the Aces have been rendered complacent by their prolonged break and easy defeat of the Sharks. Beside him, Kent gnaws stormily on his mouthguard as they watch the clock tick down. They’re going to lose, and they both know it.

Augustin reaches for the smelling salts that are kept under the lip of the boards and gives them a big enough whiff that the sensation reboots his tired synapses. He’s in the prime of his career now, but being at the top means that he’s looking over the crest of the hill at the downward slope that he’s going to be embarking on soon. There’s more than the thirst for victory driving him this time. Every day, he contends with the dreaded aphorism; if not now, when?

“Parson, your line is up,” Wilson says at the whistle for an offside, “One more shift.”

His legs ache fiercely as he hops the boards. There’s a minute and twenty-nine seconds left in the game. He looks over at Kent, tilts his head slightly, narrows his eyes, jerks his chin towards the goalie standing in the crease. Put it in, let me pick it up, get ready.

Kent nods once, stick braced across his legs, and glares at the puck until it drops.

“Parson wins the faceoff, puts it in the corner where it’s picked up by Berenger, Berenger goes around the net, feeds it back to Parson- SCORES! Kent Parson puts it away, with a minute left in the third, and the score is 3-2.”

It’s not a win, but it’s enough for now.

Luka Rubenis has been trying his best.

When he goes home to Riga, when he visits his old AHL teammates in Milwaukee, the questions follow him everywhere: how can you stand it? How do you handle it? If it were me, I wouldn’t fucking let it slide. I’d fucking do something about it.

One would think that they’re talking about some great offence against humanity. They’re not. They’re talking about Jack Zimmermann.

Listen, Luka doesn’t have anything against Jack Zimmermann, as long as he doesn’t have to see it, you know? The Stanley Cup Finals kiss was all a bit fucking much, but he doesn’t have to play with Zimmermann and he doesn’t go out of his way to lay hits like some people would want either, because before Jack Zimmermann is gay, he’s good at hockey and he’s Bad Bob’s son. Luka’s not about to make enemies he can’t afford. Besides, why should he care? It’s not his dressing room.

And then Andrew Cooley gets outed, which is distasteful. Cooley kept his life quiet, and Luka can respect that too. Getting tossed into the open like that is typical Toronto hockey media, and despite the unwarranted potshot that Cooley takes in his press statement at past teammates that Luka’s pretty sure just didn’t want someone staring at their dicks in the showers, he feels for the guy. Hell, he actually likes Matej Kaminsky, choice in sexual partners notwithstanding, and the two of them make a formidable defensive pairing. Again, it’s not his dressing room, not his problem.

And then it’s Kent Parson, which is his dressing room and his problem.

It surprises him. Kent never seemed like that kind of guy. If Luka was going to put money on anyone, it was Berenger with his moodiness and eyeliner, or Allie and Frisk together. Kent always seemed like a cool dude, and when Luka looks over at Smitty to see how he’s reacting to the news, he sees that Smitty looks happy. Proud. Smitty’s his best friend on the team, maybe even in hockey, so Luka keeps his thoughts to himself.

Still, Smitty smacks him whenever he says supportive shit like how he’s glad that Kent’s, you know, normal about it, not prancing around with feather boas and shit like those people at the bars along the Strip, “Ruben, dude. What’s wrong with you?”

“With me?” Luka retorts, “I’m trying to be nice! See, this is what I don’t fucking understand. I can’t say anything without someone jumping up my ass.”

Smitty’s face grows pinched. He doesn’t get mad, he just seems disappointed, and Luka doesn’t know why. He’s swallowing his fucking thoughts because Kent Parson is his teammate first and foremost, and that means something to him. He’s fucking trying.

Everyone on the Aces suddenly seems like Saint You Can Play of Gay Hockey where they were once occasionally throwing around words like cocksucker and fairy just like everyone else. They act like nothing has changed, like they’re so fucking enlightened and woke and shit. Luka thinks he’s lost his mind until he sits down next to Buckley on the bus, and Buckley nervously asks under the grumble of the engine, “Do you ever feel…weird about it? Parse?”

“Sometimes,” Luka admits. They don’t talk about it again, but whenever Parse insists on his Britney Spears playlist, or jokes about checking them out, they exchange commiserating glances. Parse doesn’t change, but they both know that something is different, and that for however long, Parse has been lying to them.

And who can trust a captain who lies?

The day that Buckley is traded, Luka goes to help him pack up his apartment. He parks, strolls up the walkway, and is met with Kent coming out the door of Buckley’s townhouse. Kent smiles wanly at him, and Luka bites down on the bitter question: did you have anything to do with this?

Harley, who also had clear reservations about Parse’s…proclivities is also gone, dumped for the cap space they needed to re-sign Augustin. It’s unfortunate how the math works out, but Luka bites his tongue hard about the fact that their enforcer defenceman was replaced by one of Jack Zimmermann’s skinny college teammates. Dex is friendly and hard-hitting enough, but Luka ironically doesn’t have an ally in him.

At the end of the day, he knows that it’s a stupid fucking question anyway. This is a business. Buckley’s good, but he costs too much and they need the defenseman that he and Linsky are being traded for. Harley was great, but he was getting slow and his requested salary was just too much. Everyone except Parse and Berenger are expendable pieces.

“Hey,” Parse says after a second. They both know how everyone feels in this situation, about everything. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Luka asks bitterly, and goes inside before Parse can reply. He doesn’t want to know the answer. He waits in Buck’s foyer until he hears Parse’s sleek car roar off into the distance before he calls up the stairs to announce his presence.

He and Buckley pack up the rest of Buckley’s shit in silence, but when the taxi comes to take him to the airport, Luka can’t help but prod, “You’re not gonna say anything about Parse, right? It shouldn’t…it should stay in the locker room.”

Buckley’s lips purse tightly. It takes him almost ten seconds to say, “No, I’m not gonna say anything. It’s not my problem anymore.”

Luka doesn’t know why he asked back then. He still doesn’t know now, as a shouting Augustin gets shoved into the box to sit next to an already pissed-off Parse, the two of them stewing in their own rage within the plastic confines of their prison. The way they’re acting, the Avalanche seem to think that they’ve won the whole series by putting the Aces on a three-on-five with their two best players in the box. Pompous fucks.

“Ruben,” Wilson says tersely, and Luka hops the boards. He’s the only forward on the ice, but recently, it’s a feeling he’s gotten used to.

“Aww,” the Avalanche center they send out, Leech, coos at him as they line up for the face-off. He’s from the Milwaukee AHL team, they played together for a year. They both know what they know about each other, “Look at the two fairies in the box together.”

He doesn’t know about Parse, he’s just trying to get a rise out of everyone. Luka looks over his shoulder to see that Poindexter is being held back by a thunderous looking Cross, as the ref skates over to drop the puck. Leech grins at him, and his smile dies when Luka grits out, “You never did know when to shut the fuck up, Leech.”

The Aces are his team, and Kent is his captain. Luka doesn’t have to like what he does in his free time, but he’s not a coward and he’s not a traitor. If he has to pick between his teammate and some random guy on the opposite side of the ice, he’s picking his teammate every time. No matter what.

So when Leech doesn’t learn when to shut the fuck up about Parse, even though he doesn’t know, Luka gives him a cross-check to the back hard enough to send a message. It lands him a four-minute double-minor toward the end of the period, and the rage on Parse’s face just pisses him off more. He’s all set to loudly defend himself when Parse pulls him aside in the dressing room between periods, and gruffly says, “Don’t ever fucking do that again. I don’t care what he calls me.”

“He doesn’t get to insult you.”

Kent raises an eyebrow purposefully, “With the truth?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Luka spits, “I’m not doing this to be politically fucking correct. I’m doing this because you’re our captain. I know you think I’m a bad fucking person or whatever because I don’t want to wear the fucking rainbows, but I just want to play fucking hockey. Can I do that? Is that okay with you?”

Kent is silent for a moment before he says, “Don’t ever fucking take a cheap shot like that again. Got it?”

Luka nods stiffly, but Parse catches him by the arm before he can enter the dressing room.

“And I don’t think you’re a bad person,” he says sharply. “You’re an Ace, just like me.”

When they win despite a scrum at the final buzzer, Luka gives Leech a big fucking middle finger just because he can. It’s his dressing room, and his problem. Nobody else’s

“What do you think?” Augustin prods his split lip and blackening eye, “Do you think my agent will be mad?”

Kent snorts. He’s not talking about his hockey agent, Jerry-Whose-Name-Is-Actually-Steve, but rather his other one: both Kent and the internet were equal parts excited and horrified that Augustin began doing campaigns for high-end fashion brands while, as his new agent Corinne distastefully says, “he still has a straight nose and all of his teeth.” The fight hasn’t disturbed either of those features, but his right eye is purple and red.

“I thought you said you didn’t book shoots during the playoffs,” Frank says as he cracks and shakes an icepack. “It’ll go down in a week. None of the bones are broken, you lucky fuck.”

The score was so steep that the frustrated Avalanche had started throwing their weight around, and Augustin’s not one to back down from a challenge. Near the end of the third, he had asked Wilson excitedly if he could fight someone like a kid asking the teacher if he could eat a bug. Wilson had looked at the score and shrugged: “Might as well. Just don’t break any of your ribs.”

“I don’t,” Augustin says now, wincing as the ice hits his face. He won the fight, but just barely, and his phone is ringing in the other room. It’s the Imperial March, the ringtone he has set for Corinne’s number, “But after the playoffs, I’m supposed to do something with, uh…someone.”

“Do you not remember because you got hit in the head or because you don’t care?” Frank asks.

“Oh, it is entirely because I don’t care,” Augustin replies, “It pays like shit anyways, all I get is free stuff that I never wear or use.”

“And you’re on billboards,” Kent adds. Augustin groans.

“I hate those fucking things, I can’t go anywhere anymore.”

Frank rolls his eyes and walks out, which means that Kent can leap onto the exam table and press their shoulders together. The heady feeling of victory leads him to press his lips very carefully against the bruise of an errant fist left on Augustin’s jaw.

“If it makes you feel better,” he says, “No more fucking stupid TV ads for you.”

“My one consolation,” Augustin mutters, leaning his head against the top of Kent’s hair. Corinne calls again, but neither of them moves to fetch the phone. “I get to keep my dignity.”

And if Kent rewatches the fight when they get home, just to see glimpses of the fire that burns beneath Augustin’s cold, focused facade, that’s nobody’s business but his.

All goalies have bad games.

They’re up in the series but not by enough, and Scraps lets in one, two, three goals before Wilson realizes that the wince on his face isn’t just from frustration. Halfway through the second, he beckons Scraps off the ice and sends out Elias Landvik for the kid’s first ever playoff game.

There’s been a hole in the dressing room since Adam Linsky was traded, a hole that Kent’s seen ripped open and patched up over and over. It took three months for Mitsuya and Smitty to really bounce back from the loss of their friend, and Lando doesn’t really help his own case. He’s quiet and shy, nice enough but prone to long stretches of wide-eyed silence. Smitty jokes that he seems like he was grown and raised in a lab until Kent tells him to knock it off, but it’s not a particularly inaccurate comparison.

Like most of the team, Kent doesn’t know what the fuck to make of him, but Augustin likes him a lot and all the kids like Augustin, even Ruben, so they manage it. They came to Vegas from the Habs in the same trade, and Kent’s pretty sure that Augustin feels a sort of responsibility for him. The number of times he’s come over only to be cockblocked by the young goalie curled up on Augustin’s couch watching Star Wars is in the dozens.

Lando is weird and meticulous, and he takes his rituals seriously. He pats the posts, knocks the brow of his helmet very lightly against the crossbar like he’s praying, and Kent can feel the shifting unease of the bench as their untested, second-string, shortest goalie in the league crouches in his crease and braces his elbows on his knees.

“Is he gonna do okay?” Kent asks. They’re already losing, but if Scraps needs to rest for the next game, Lando’s got massive shoes to fill. He’s only played thirty-five games this season, and he did well in them, but there’s a world of difference between a regular season game against Buffalo or Edmonton and Game Four against the Avs.

“He just needs to find his groove,” Augustin replies, eyes trained on Lando as the third line gets ready for the face-off. The arena lights glimmer off of Lando’s jet-black, undecorated mask. Kent swallows his nerves.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Nous sommes fucked,” Augustin says grimly. “But isn’t that just how the game is played?”

It’s always hard to claw back from a three-goal deficit, not that Kent doesn’t give it his fucking all. He scores one towards the end of the second, and Keever delivers another pristine goal towards the middle of the third. Along the bench, hope starts to grow; players lean forward, smile widely, cheer and bang their sticks against the boards when Lando makes a particularly acrobatic save.

Lando doesn’t let a single shot trickle by. It’s only when he races for the bench, and someone bobbles the puck in the Avs’ end, allowing one of their defenders to pot it in the back of the empty net, that their fates are sealed. The illusion shatters. The Aces lose.

Kent delivers a deadpan press conference that is lacklustre even for him, and comes out of the dressing room to see Lando sitting in the rafters of the tunnel. He’s not sure how the hell the kid got up there, but he spots the legs swinging from the metal scaffolding and calls up, “Good game, Lando.”

Lando peers down with his massive dark eyes, and doesn’t smile. His heavily accented voice rumbles, “Thanks, Parse.”

“You ready for Game Five?”

Scraps is being ordered to rest his strained shoulder before the next series, and the media is already in a frenzy about how this is going to affect the Aces’ run. Lando doesn’t seem to know what they’re saying about him, and if he does, he doesn’t seem to care. He just shrugs. “Is just a game, yeah? No sweat. I got this.”

“Right,” Kent says, smiling in spite of himself as Augustin emerges from the room.

“Who are you talking to?”

“Lando’s in the ceiling.”

“Sure,” Augustin agrees, as if this is entirely normal, “C’mon, Lando. We have a plane to catch, and Wilson’ll kill you if you fall.”

Lando swings himself down with alarming dexterity, landing with a soft thud on the concrete floor and straightening his game suit primly. Kent has to close his mouth with a snap, and shakes his head. “Fucking goalies, man.”

He stays behind to wait for the rest of the team to trickle out, and listens to the sound of Augustin and Lando talking about Star Wars fade as they walk together down the hall.

Jeremiah Jansing didn’t know how to tell Angelique Berenger that he wasn’t planning on going back to school after his first year, so he made her brother do it for him.

Jem grew up in the Deep South, almost as deep as it gets, really. He’s from the bayous of Louisiana where there isn’t an ice rink for twenty square miles. He didn’t start off playing hockey on ice, but rather hockey on grass and water-worn wooden slats, with an old wooden stick gifted to him by his grandfather after he fell in love with the sport at the age of four.

It’s strange, the things we remember from our childhood. Jem doesn’t remember much about the hurricane other than dirty water and fleeing for their lives, but he remembers sitting up late in a relative’s living room, watching a hockey game for the first time, while watching television for the first time.

When you survive a disaster that way, it sticks with you.

The old wooden stick was used as often to hit alligators away from the chicken pen as it was to shoot pucks at the wall of the brand-new house they built in the wake of the storm. His dad isn’t Cajun, but his mom is, and as much as she despaired of her son’s aspirations, she knew they came from their Acadian roots. They’re travelers, survivors, and they have deep roots in the swamps that draw them back despite the waterlogged soil and a government that doesn’t give a flying fuck about them, but Jem has always been restless.

He begged his father, who cajoled his mother, who allowed his grandfather to drive him to New Orleans for hockey tryouts. He was behind on skating for years, but what he lacked in speed, he made up for in dexterity and sight, and sheer fucking force of will. Eventually, the New Orleans minor hockey club knew they had someone special on their hands, and the entirety of the bayou, still struggling from the storm, came together to fundraise enough to move Jem from his house in the swamp and hour-long commute to practice, to a billet for Houston’s AAA team.

It was there, homesick and hating the loudness of the city, that he saw his first NHL game in person at ten years old. He watched an eighteen-year-old Augustin Berenger destroy the Florida Panthers in an arena vibrating with his energy, listened to the crowd roar for his thickly-accented voice, and vowed to himself that he would be just like that one day.

It’s incredible, the things that are possible when we put our minds to it.

He studiously weathered the insults calling him a redneck and white trash, spoke to his grandparents only in Louisiana French so that he wouldn’t forget it, and ended up at Boston University on a full-ride scholarship. There’s an old folk theory about red strings, and his leads him to Angelique Berenger, who takes a chance on the swamp kid tearing up Texas AAA that none of the other D1 schools want to bet on.

“Howdy,” he greets her nervously on the first day of practice, and the rest, they say, is history. She finds him a good agent, who gets him into the Draft Combine where he outcompetes every other prospect on sheer endurance, and then he’s meeting general managers from half of the NHL. He dresses well and looks them in the eye but refuses to flatten his accent, refuses to abide by their arbitrary rules, and towards the end of it all, only one man never flinches at his unflinching attitude.

“Welcome to the Aces,” Hollis St. Martin tells him onstage at the NHL Entry Draft. Jem thinks he might never stop smiling again. He busts his ass through the summer, drags himself through prospect camp, and shoves his way onto the fourth line of the Aces roster against all odds, because that’s what his family and town did for him, and by God, he’s going to make it by any means necessary. He’s going to bring the biggest prize that the bayou has ever seen home with him, let all of them touch it and know who really got him there.

He moves into Augustin Berenger’s spare room at the end of September, and sits nervously in the living room with a mug of tea cradled in his lap as Augustin calls his sister, “Yeah, he’s staying here. Don’t fucking yell at me, I’m not the one who tried to sell him so hard. Yes, I’ll take care of him. Can you relax? He’s doing fine- Jansing, come tell my sister you’re alive, she doesn’t believe me.”

The desert is as dry as the swamp is damp. Augustin forces Jem to call him Gus and makes him breakfast in the mornings. He lets Jem host seafood boils for the team in his apartment when he feels homesick, teaches Jem Quebecois curses and how to win faceoffs more often than not, which journalists to watch out for, and yells at a fair few of them himself when he thinks they’re taking potshots at Jem’s accent and slow answers. They speak French together, although their dialects are practically two different languages, and Jem feels like he’s home.

Everyone asks him: “What’s it like to play with Kent Parson?” Don’t get him wrong, Jem loves Kent like a fucking big brother, because Kent is his captain, and Augustin’s best friend, and even though he’s a quintessential Yank, he’s filled to the brim with grit and survival instinct. But nobody ever asks Jem what it’s like to play with the hero who made him fall in love a second time with the plumes of ice and rush of breath.

He started playing hockey because he saw it on the television and it reminded him of his survival, but Augustin is the reason that he still plays. And when they win the Stanley Cup and he brings it back to Bayou Gauche, Jem is finally going to pluck up the courage to tell Augustin just that.

“Mitsuya to McCandles, McCandles dumps it to Jansing- SCORES! Jeremiah Jansing puts it away with a minute and twenty seconds left in the third, and the Aces are up by one! Keep an eye on the boy from the bayou, he’s going to go far.”

“Notre Père, qui est aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié.”

Kent lies on the hotel bed, the lamp flickering as the wind blows outside. They’re in Colorado for Game Six, and if they win, it’s on to the next. It’s never a good sign when a series goes to seven, but if they’re going to go to seven against anyone before the finals, it’s going to happen here in Denver. The Avalanche and Aces have both given it their all. May the best team win, or whatever the fuck.

”que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.”

Augustin kneels by the bed, hands clasped together and forehead pressed to the joints of his thumbs. His eyes are squeezed shut as his mouth moves quietly, head bent over the mattress. He doesn’t bring his rosary on road trips. Right now, the string of green and grey beads is sitting in the bedside table back in Las Vegas, because at the end of the day, Kent’s pretty sure that Augustin doesn’t actually believe in God, the man who lives upstairs, the arbiter of the world. He just has faith in something larger than him, and it comes out in the only way that he knows how.

“Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour. Pardonne-nous nos offenses, comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.”

Hockey isn’t supposed to be luck. Most, if not all of its variables are controllable with skill, talent, soul and ambition. But there’s always that if, that mysterious factor that controls which way the errant puck bounces, whether a loud sound distracts you or your opponent, if a shot hits padding or unprotected muscle.

“Et ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation mais délivre-nous du Mal.”

Augustin crawls into bed, reaching out to flick the light off. In the darkness, Kent breathes in the smell of antiseptic spray from the bandaged cut on Augustin’s cheekbone, and the faint scent of tea tree and basil from his hair. Augustin’s bare arms cradle him, and it’s here that Kent prays to the hockey gods like he did as a child. A longer stride, a better shot, a lucky bounce. A win. Maybe he doesn’t believe in it, but he covers his bases.

“Amen.”

It must be worth something, because they don’t go to seven. The Aces advance and the Avalanche enter purgatory.

The summer after he got his first NHL paycheque, Augustin took his sister to Europe.

He was only nineteen, and wanted to forget who he was in the wake of what had transpired: his impending boot down to the minors, the lingering pain in his face, the fact that he achieved his childhood dream only to have nothing and no one. Europe was new and strange, so far outside the realm of what he knew that he tried his hand at becoming an entirely different person.

They only went to countries where hockey meant next to nothing: Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain. There were a lot of men, a lot of weed, a lot of late nights and outfits that he couldn’t be caught dead wearing anywhere else. His sister watched him stumble in at odd hours in the morning, stinking of cannabis, and Augustin had hated the way that her mouth pursed. I’m not even acceptable to my own sister.

He kept extending their itinerary, pushing off training and development camps as he tried to live as a fundamentally different person, but it took him a few weeks to learn what Angelique figured out the first day: there was no amount of drugs and sex, no amount of change, and no amount of running away that could alter who he was and what he loved.

It was midnight in Italy when Kent Parson was drafted first overall by the Las Vegas Aces. Augustin sat on a hotel bed in Florence with Angelique as the blond teenager he had looked down on for two years as a smug, shining peacock of a boy swaggered up to the stage and smiled so falsely that his bared teeth seemed to bite into Augustin’s liver from an ocean away. His skin was grey under the lights. It was undignified, unbecoming. Unfair.

“What a way to start a career,” Angelique had said mournfully as the screen flashed between the draft and discussions of Jack Zimmermann’s overdose. Augustin’s hand had itched towards his phone. He could get Parson’s number. He could call or text, one first overall to another, one lonely, traumatized boy to his successor. He could lie, and say it’s all worth it. It gets better. I promise that it’ll be okay.

He didn’t call. Three days later, he was on a plane to Providence for training camp with Dustin Snow, who was picked up in the Falconers’ expansion draft and thus liberated from Roger Gerhard’s dominion. The other self he had crafted stayed behind in stubbed-out joints on dirty sidewalks and the thrum of house music in Barcelona’s most exclusive clubs, and he doesn’t miss him much at all.

He came back to Houston in the fall, played in the minors, and watched as Kent Parson tore up the league in his rookie season. A dead part in him was suddenly exposed to light. Air circulated in clenched lungs for the first time in months. He watched a blond bullet rip around the ice and thought, it’s just like when we were kids.

Three times, the Aeros management ignored Gerhard and asked him to come back. Twice, he said no. The third time was in December, three games before the Aeros played the Aces for the first time that season, right as Parson was about to hit a ten-game points streak. Augustin swallowed his bile and agreed to suffer Roger Gerhard, Tim Goldman, and all the other demons that didn’t live in his head just so he could play like he used to.

Parson didn’t get his ten-game point streak that season.

That was a long time ago.

Still, Kent brings it up constantly now: when he needs the dishes done, when he’s too tired to vacuum, when he doesn’t like the channel on the TV or he wants Augustin to make dinner. Augustin desperately promises him that he’ll get them past the Conference Finals if Kent stops holding a milestone he passed in his second season over Augustin’s head, and Kent cheekily says, “We’ll see.”

“You have to wonder what makes Berenger and Parson’s chemistry so compelling. If we look back, they’ve known each other for a long time. They were rivals of a sort in the QMJHL, Berenger and the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies won the Memorial Cup in Parson’s penultimate season in Rimouski, and their styles of play have always been suited to combating one another. I think we were all very interested in what would happen when that trade came through last season, and very excited by the results.”

“You’re absolutely right, and I think what we’re seeing here is an equal and opposite reaction going on. Parson and Berenger were so good at exploiting each other’s weaknesses that they know exactly where to help each other now that they’re on the same team, and it makes for some incredible hockey.”

“It seems that their Juniors rivalry is almost necessary for their success, in the same way I think Parson and Zimmermann’s time as teammates helped make them such exciting opponents now that they’re both in the league.”

“In any case, the Aces have a long road ahead of them, even after their Game One win against the Blues here in the Conference Finals, but this has been an exceptionally promising season for both Parson and Berenger, and for Berenger, there’s nowhere to go but up.”

Dustin Snow watches the Aces win from Tater’s apartment.

The Falcs were eliminated in the first round by the Bruins, and Dustin can hold a grudge like nobody’s fucking business. He’s already predisposed to hating the motherfuckers because he’s from the suburbs of Toronto and grew up as a Leafs fan, and now the motherfuckers in question have taken him out by the knees, and he’s not getting any fucking younger.

He’s not entirely sure why he’s at Alexei’s place, though. Mashkov, fucking massive teddy bear of a man that he is, seems to be taking his job as a defencemen of protecting the goalie a little bit too seriously. Every time Dustin feels moderately sad, which is pretty often now that the eighth (ninth?) love of his life has broken up with him and fled across the country with an underwear model, he gets an ominously cheerful text from Alexei asking him to come over to play video games, or to catch up on Love Island, or in this case, to watch the Aces beat the Blues.

It’s starting to get concerning, but Alexei doesn’t throw him a pity party, he just throws popcorn at the television screen and boos whenever Kent Parson’s face pops up on the screen.

“I don’t get it,” Dustin says as the Aces get a power play and Alexei throws popcorn at Parson’s face, made massive by the size of the TV setup. Augustin is at the center of the slashing call. He has shit-disturbing abilities that Dustin can only marvel at. Typical fucking Aces hockey. “You and Parse were thick as thieves at Jack’s wedding. What’s the fucking deal?”

“Wedding is armistice,” Alexei sighs, throwing another piece when the Blues try to argue with the refs, “Ugh, should know better. Berenger does not let himself get caught easy. Suck it up! Just play and lose!”

“You gotta piss him off if you want him to get a penalty too,” Dustin comments, watching as the camera cuts to Augustin and Kent talking by their bench. They’re smiling at each other, obviously shit-talking about whatever the Blues’ captain is saying furiously, their heads leaned so close together that they’re almost brushing. You would only notice if you knew, and if you know, it’s unmistakable.

Dustin feels something warm twist in his gut as he raises his third beer to his mouth. In eight fucking years of knowing him, he’s never seen Augustin smile like that for anyone else. He didn’t even think it was possible.

He thinks about Zimmermann’s wedding, and the thing he saw that he was definitely not supposed to see. He’s always sort of suspected that Augustin was…for lack of better phrasing, completely uninterested in women, but it was still a bit of a shock to go looking for him and see him kissing Kent Parson around the side of Bad Bob Zimmermann’s house.

Not just drunk-kissing either, like Dustin did a couple of times with guys in Juniors. Sober, romantic-movie style making out, just straight macking it in the wings of the gay wedding of the decade. He had bitten down on the urge to say, is it catching or something? because they were really going at it.

And he’d never seen Augustin look so peaceful.

Dustin probably watched for way too long to be considered appropriate before he turned around and left them to it. When they stumbled back five minutes later with flushed faces, he didn’t say anything.

“Good to know,” Alexei says now as the Blues captain gets waved away and the face-off is set up. “You know how best to upset him? All I know is to make fun of his sister, but feels…mean to do it. I like her a lot.”

Dustin ignores him. The Aces score on the power play pretty quickly, a beauty of a shot by Troy that rebounds and gets picked up and put neatly away by Petteri Makela. That’s curtains on the Blues for this game. They’re not gonna get back from a 3-1 deficit with a minute and a half left. Dustin lets his heavy head hit the back of the couch, “I think this is their year.”

The Aces are playing better than he’s ever seen them play, even better than they’d been when Parson won them their first Cup. If he was a betting man, he’d put his entire bank account on the Parson-Berenger duo. Double or nothing, as they say.

Alexei says, “Am thinking so too. And then us, yes?”

“Bro, as much as I want to, Parse and Berenger have their weird psychic bond,” Dustin snorts and drains the bottle, slamming it with a thunk onto Alexei’s coffee table. “That’s gonna get them through.”

“We not having psychic bond, Snowy?”

“Not like theirs.”

“Maybe we could be having it, though,” Alexei says, voice calm and almost purposeful. For a moment, Dustin wonders what he knows about Augustin and Parson, Sure, with the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that they were fucking at least and dating at most long before Zimmermann’s wedding, but that’s only after seeing them nearly rub each other off in the shadow of some hedges. Is Alexei more observant than him? Does he know? Did someone on the inside, Scarpello or Zimmermann, tell him?

His stomach turns when he looks over and Alexei is staring at him. His next swallow is harsh. Alexei’s eyes are massive and brown, crinkled with vague amusement in the corners, and Dustin experiences the visceral vertigo of sincerely thinking, hey, when did he get hot?

The clock hits zero. The Aces win.

Alexei clicks his tongue and starts gathering up the errant beer bottles and popcorn projectiles. Dustin stays sitting on the couch, trying to maintain a straight face as he thinks about what Parson said to him at the All-Star Game last season: “You coming out too, Snow? Giving Providence the monopoly on gay hockey players?”

Obviously not, but Parson’s words have always had a habit of worming into his opponents’ skulls at the most inopportune times.

“I have to go,” he tells Alexei once they’ve finished cleaning up, and basically runs out of the apartment before Alexei can stop him. He pulls out his phone the second that fresh air hits his face and texts Augustin: how did you know you were gay?

Dustin doesn’t like to brag, but he has a lot of friends because he’s an amicable fucking guy. He could probably have asked Jack or even Bittle, but there’s a kind of brutal honesty that only Augustin can deliver that he needs right now to cut through all his bullshit. He watches his phone all the way home, but Augustin never checks his mobile devices on a good day, let alone the night of a playoff game.

His body drags his stressed, frantic mind to sleep sometimes around three in the morning, and he doesn’t get a reply until the sun rises, when he wakes up and sees that Augustin called him three times right after he went to bed, and texted him: Who said I was gay?

His gut plummets. He hits the call button despite it being five in the morning in Las Vegas. Augustin picks up after six rings, voice sleep-ridden and so heavily accented that Dustin can barely understand it, “Whoever this is, I fucking hate you.”

“I saw you making out with Parson at Zimmermann’s wedding, that’s how I know.” Dustin says bluntly, “Now can we focus on me?”

“Dustin?”

“You don’t fucking recognize my voice? Fuck you, man, after everything that I-”

“Dusty, shut the fuck up for a second,” Augustin grouses, voice muffled by the sound of bedsheets rustling, “Okay, so, next time you tell me that you know I’m gay, I would appreciate context before I scour the internet for another Andrew Cooley situation in the middle of the fucking playoffs.”

Dustin swears, hitting his pillow with his fist. Of all the things to fucking forget about. “Shit, I’m sorry, man. I was just…freaking out.”

“‘Kay,” Augustin mutters, sounding utterly disinterested in his plight. “You’re so fucking lucky we won last night, or else I would be killing you right now.”

“Is that Dustin Snow?” Dustin hears Parson mutter groggily on the other end of the line, “Tell him that I hate him.”

“Kent says he-”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“You’re not gay, Dusty,” Augustin’s voice is as dry as the desert he lives in, “You enjoy dating women.”

“Okay, so maybe I’m what’s-it-called…bisexual or whatever. It’s the twenty-first century. I can fuck a dude if I want,” he replies, which doesn’t much help his case for any potential heterosexuality. “I sure flirt with them often enough.”

“Sure. Here’s my advice,” Augustin says tiredly, a yawn rounding out his words, “Go actually kiss a dude, and if that doesn’t clear anything up, fuck him dans un pecup- or, actually, you know what, why don’t you start with a handjob in the back of a pickup truck? Training wheels.”

Alexei doesn’t own a pickup truck and neither does he. Maybe he can borrow someone else’s, “Okay. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Go fuck yourself.”

Augustin hangs up with a click, and Dustin sighs, flopping back against his pillows. He texts Augustin after a few minutes: great win last night, by the way.

Augustin texts him back three hours later, I know. Let me know if you fuck Mashkov or not.

Dustin’s gotta get himself some better friends.

Kent sits with his chin propped on his knees and watches the steam from the shower spiral into the air.

He already showered at the arena, but this is a cleanse. This is how he rinses out all the awful, sticky darknesses that cling to his innermost parts when he loses games like this. Not just a loss, but a complete and utter failure. His failure.

His skin is red and starting to prune when Augustin opens the bathroom door and reaches unabashedly past the shower curtain to turn down the water’s heat. Kent doesn’t say anything as the water grows cold, then freezing. He’s too busy watching the droplets glide down his skin, seeing their tactical blunders in the trails.

It used to be that he did this in private, and dragged himself out once his skin was lobster-red and he was lightheaded from the heat and steam. He used to lose himself in his mistakes, tracking them as water pelted his skin and the dull sound of it hitting the tile reminded him of pucks hitting the boards. It doesn’t happen as often anymore, and typically not where someone can see it.

Augustin whisks the shower curtain aside and says, “Get up.”

“I’m naked,” Kent replies, not moving. He’s too busy trying to remember who he had passed to in the first period that had led to the turnover and the Blues’ first goal to look at Augustin’s face.

“Yeah, nothing I haven’t seen before, buddy. Get the fuck out of the bathtub.”

“I fucked the zone entry in the second- HEY!”

Augustin leans under the ice-cold spray, still fully-clothed, and says as seriously as one can speak with water dribbling into their eyes and mouth, “You’re killing the environment, Parson. Get out of the shower. We have a game to win in two days and we can’t do that if you drown.” He sighs sharply, and offers, “I’ll also suck you off, but you have thirty seconds to get out before the offer disappears.”

He withdraws and walks away still dripping. That gets Kent out of his funk better than most things would, as does the wet button-down shirt that Augustin throws at his face as he stalks out of the bathroom.

Ethan Cross hit his prime at twenty-four, married the love of his life at twenty-five, won a Stanley Cup at twenty-six, and became alternate captain of an NHL team with two days left of being twenty-nine.

How old are you supposed to feel when you do all of that, and now find yourself on the wrong side of thirty? He goes from immortal, a hero, a prime specimen of human athleticism to a geezer in the span of a year. His seasons go from endless to finite. Four or five, maybe six left if he’s lucky. His contracts will get shorter, his pay will start to decline. He’ll have to sacrifice already dwindling money and time to keep his no-trade list for the sake of his family.

All of his friends outside of hockey, their lives are just getting started. They’re getting promotions, getting married, travelling the world. His wife is still finishing her PhD, she’s not even out of school yet. On the other hand, Ethan feels like his life is about to end. He feels like he’s knocking on death’s door.

He tells Lena one night, “I think I’m getting old.”

She kisses his temple, “Not old. You’re becoming a DILF. It’s all about terminology, babe.”

It doesn’t help that his kids keep getting older and the kids keep getting younger. It’s hard enough when your first rookie is Kent Parson, who at eighteen was reticent at best and downright mean at worst for the first few months of his career. He grows up quickly, because every day that passes in their line of work might as well be a week, every week might as well be a month, and so on and so forth. Now, Kent is their captain, leading them to their second Cup at twenty-five. He’s in his prime. And Ethan is old.

He sees the kids and wants to grab them all by the shoulders and shake them: enjoy it, don’t take it for granted, breathe it in. You will never get it back. He sees Kent’s furrowed brow and tense mouth, and knows that nobody deserves to be captain more than him, but at the same time, nobody else deserves to be a young, carefree hotshot more than him. To be that old at eighteen or twenty-five is a blessing and a curse.

His contract is up at the end of the season. The negotiations are paused, but it’s already looking dicey for him. Allie and Frisk are both up for contract renewals too, and they’re younger, better, and safer bets than he is.

What matters more to him? The family he’s carved here in seven long years? The pride and dignity of getting paid what he’s worth? Lena defends her dissertation in a month, his children are still young enough to pick up and move without destroying their psyches. He could go. It’s how the business works. He could just go.

He sits on the concrete stairs and watches as the team plays sewer ball in the tunnel, their shouts ringing off the walls. Augustin is playing today, which is abnormal, but the last game’s loss requires desperate measures. He’s terrible at this game, which everyone else makes sure to let him know every time he touches the ball and sends it careening into the ceiling.

Sometimes, Cross thinks he’s sucking on purpose to cheer everyone else up, until he remembers that Augustin will do anything for his team except for lose.

There are a number of tough decisions to be made, chief of which is who will take the A after he’s gone, if he goes. It was hard enough to take it from Hairball, and now he might have to pass it on to someone else. It has to be the right person, or else he’s fucking up Parse’s leadership, he’s setting one of the youngest teams in the league adrift and lighting it on fire for good measure.

“Why me?” He had said wonderingly to Hairball during one of their monthly phone calls, back when they first told him that he got the A. Hairball’s snort had been muffled by the buzz of static.

“Because you fucking deserve it, Crosser. Management doesn’t know their ass from their elbows sometimes, but at least they’re willing to admit it when it matters. Shetty and I said it should be you, Parse said it should be you. Jeff didn’t pick up his phone, but he would have said you.”

“How did you know it should be me?”

Hairball’s voice is exasperated, “Come on, man. We all just know. Who does everyone look to? Who does everyone listen to? You just know.”

Across the tunnel, Augustin lets rip a string of French profanities so thick and fast that Ethan can barely track them all. “I hate this fucking game!”

Nobody seems upset or perturbed; there’s about fifty Kelvin between an insult he means and an insult he doesn’t. The rookies laugh, the veterans chirp him ruthlessly, and over in the corner, Kent looks up from the game tape he’s watching and a smile momentarily flickers across the severe expression he’s worn since they lost Game Three.

Augustin has been here a year, and yet everyone looks to him when they can’t look to Kent or Jeff. It doesn’t happen often, but it is inevitable; Kent is a brilliant leader, charismatic and confident, but he gets caught up in his own head and it’s hard to talk him down from the hills he chooses to die on. Jeff is caring and trustworthy, he’s the glue of the team, but being solid often means lacking sharpness.

When shit hits the fan, Augustin is there with a contingency plan, an angry jab at an opposing player, sharp words for the journalists. He’s the only one that Ethan’s ever seen manage to get through the fog of war that Parse sometimes has in his eyes, sent in like the bomb squad to diffuse the pressure. He’s touchy and volatile, but always like a grenade; pull the pin and throw him where he needs to go, and he gets the job done.

You just know.

Maybe Ethan’ll be here next year, A on his chest. Maybe he’ll be somewhere else, his value sky-high with a second Cup under his belt. It doesn’t do to dwell on it. Today, he’s an Ace. For the rest of this season, he’s an Ace. For the last seven years, he’s been an Ace.

And if they lift the Cup at the end of this, he’ll be a fucking Las Vegas Ace when they do it.

“Poindexter across the blue line to Cross, takes a shot- SCORES! Ethan Cross puts it away twelve minutes into overtime, and the Aces take Game Four.”

Things are not always sunshine and rainbows.

Kent knows that sometimes he has a habit of being too overbearing, too controlling, but being captain is his job. There are times when he has to be able to tell people what to do, and they have to listen. Maybe he does it in the wrong way, sometimes at the wrong time, but he does it with their best interests at heart.

Augustin questions everything and everyone, doesn’t like being told what to do, and will mutiny the moment he thinks someone is fucking someone else over. He will go to war for what he believes in, and he’s thorough about it. He doesn’t stop until he’s won, and he always wins.

Sometimes, it bleeds into their lives in the worst ways.

“You can’t fucking pull that shit,” Kent hears himself shout. Most of the team has vacated to the showers, and the sound of running water won’t cover his voice when he’s this loud, but at this moment, he couldn’t give a fuck less. “Did you hear what I said? What did I fucking say? Do not instigate when we’re only down by one. You had one fucking job!”

Augustin throws his shin pad into his bag with a loud crack. His mouth is set in a firm, stubborn line, “I did hear you. You were fucking wrong.”

“I’m the captain, you-”

“Oh, my apologies, should I bow down?” Augustin hisses, looking up at him through dark-streaked eyelashes and strings of brown hair. “Should I bend the knee, start groveling? All hail Kent Parson, God’s gift to the game of hockey-”

“Oh, grow the fuck up.” Kent yells, his voice echoing around the dressing room. In the other room, more showers crank on, “You fucking blew it, Augustin. I needed them to be complacent, and you pissed them off, they fucking piled on you, and guess what? They fucking won!”

“That’s not fucking on me,” Augustin shouts right back, “You walk around like king of the fucking hill, handing out orders like master and fucking commander, what was I supposed to do? Read your mind? This isn’t on me!”

“Then who’s fault is it?” Kent sneers, crossing his arms, “Please, enlighten me, if you can’t admit that you fucking got it wrong, that I was right and you can’t handle the fact that I was smarter than you, then whose fucking fault is it?”

“Fuck you,” Augustin jabs a finger in his face, mouth twisted in an ugly snarl, “You think you can bully every problem into submission. Well, you can’t. Learn to fucking live with it.”

He storms into the showers, and everyone else comes pouring out a minute later, towels hiked hurriedly around their waists. There’s still shampoo in Mitty’s hair. Kent sits in his cubicle and everybody avoids him like he’s got the plague until he decides, fuck it and storms out of the room entirely. Augustin doesn’t want him to play captain? He can deal with the team.

Except halfway down the highway he remembers that Augustin’s not an alternate, and it’s Swoops and Cross picking up his slack. He texts them both an apology and receives their replies in rapid succession.

Crosser: no sweat, i got u

Swoopsy: at least the makeup sex will be hot

This isn’t the first time they’ve fought this season, and it won’t be the last time they fight in their careers, but every time it happens, it feels like the end of the world. The anger always evaporates by the time he gets home, and sick fear replaces it. He closes and locks the door to his empty apartment, picks up Kit, and stands under the shower for forty-five minutes with her staring at him from the bath mat thinking that this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

When he gets out, Augustin still hasn’t called. Usually, it’s easier than this; one of them is clearly more wrong than the other, and knows it’s their turn to make amends. But today was a home loss in the playoffs, two games away from when they went home last year, and they both could be wrong.

Augustin always wins. Kent doesn’t admit defeat. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

He goes to bed still seething with anger and despair, and wakes up at three in the morning sweating buckets from the hot, heavy weight pressed against his back and bent over the crook of his waist. Augustin’s face is placid with sleep, and he tugs Kent back down with a tired hand.

Do you have to say sorry in order to apologize? Maybe not. Maybe he can just wake up early and have coffee ready and say, “We’ll get them tomorrow.”

Everybody told Hollis St. Martin that trading for Augustin Berenger was a mistake.

The Habs GM, Jerome and the rest of the head office, the entire recruitment bureau, even his wife told him that it was a terrible idea. Berenger would be too expensive for how well he played, and the desert is a delicate ecosystem; one player can throw off the balance of an entire team. The Aces can’t afford to fail and they can’t afford to trouble the waters, because they need Kent Parson to want to stay.

That’s the trouble that Hollis inherits from the outgoing general manager; the Aces depend on Kent Parson. They’re built around him like a pedestal or a sarcophagus, depending on your point of view. Sure, they have big names other than him: Ethan Cross, Jeff Troy, Vittorio Scarpello, but Parson is their captain, their saviour, their brand name.

It’s a shit strategy, because in five years or less, Parson might be gone. Without him, the team collapses. Hollis watches Parson get more and more antsy as the team’s performance plateaus, and knows that the status quo he’s been saddled with is unsustainable. Someone needs to kick the team into gear, play with Parson instead of for him. Hollis needs to rebuild before the house collapses, and the rebuild starts with someone who can think quickly, who can act on it, and most importantly, who doesn’t worship the hallowed ground that Parson walks on.

It’s not the ghost of an old juniors rivalry or the first overall that sends Hollis to Montreal, nor is it the stellar Olympics and IIHF performances juxtaposed against a lackluster NHL career. It’s what Roger Gerhard told him a long time ago, when he was still allowed within a hundred feet of an NHL bench: “He has no respect for authority, no respect for the way things work. He’s not right for this.”

Roger Gerhard is a bully, and he breaks his players like they’re mules. Hollis St. Martin and Mike Wilson have seen grown men considered the toughest of the tough eviscerated mentally and emotionally by the man once considered the best coach in the league, but the skinny eighteen-year-old Quebecois farm boy who wears goddamn eyeliner refuses to be broken into shape. It takes one night of beers for them to decide whether they want him enough.

“Can you coach him?” Hollis asks Wilson. Wilson just shrugs.

That pretty much seals it.

The rest of the head office thinks that Evgeni Sokolov and Carl Bergman, two solid, reliable forwards, is a massive overpay for an emotional locker-room cancer and an on-ice liability who just happens to play like a first-line forward. He wishes he could say that at the time, he had utter confidence in Berenger’s placement on the team, that he knew he was getting a second legendary franchise player for the price of a top-six winger.

He didn’t. It was a Hail fucking Mary.

Augustin is the lit match that he lobs into the Aces dressing room to see if the rest of them are made of water or gasoline, and he gets his fire in return. It’s always hard to predict how players will gel with their teams, but Berenger’s only gotten smarter, better at hockey, and far more insubordinate since he was eighteen; three things that Parson considers himself the best in the league at, and can’t help but try and compete with. Hollis doesn’t have to wait more than one game to know that his gamble has paid off.

That’s what his job is, at the end of the day. A gamble. There’s no better team to do it for than this one.

After the year that Augustin has and the points he puts up, the contract negotiations are brutal. Steve Rivest is one of the most notorious agents in the business, and Hollis can only do so much to pretend that they don’t want Augustin badly since Parson makes it known to everyone with a pulse that if he doesn’t get Berenger back as his winger, he’s going to die. Hollis has Jerome make snide comments about Augustin’s breakout year with the Aces being a fluke and brings up his suspension as leverage, but Winnipeg undercutting them with a truly mind-boggling eight-by-eight puts them on the back foot. They simply can’t afford it.

So he offers the one thing he knows that Berenger will take. “I’ll do a complete no-movement clause if he agrees to these terms.”

Hockey doesn’t have secrets, not really. Hollis knows a lot of things, and suspects a lot of others; knows things about a hospital visit in Las Vegas for a visiting player’s fractured jaw eight years ago, back when he was just a member of the Aces hockey operations. Suspects others, after he overhears the Aces equipment manager Jim instructing his colleagues not to breathe a word about what Parson and Berenger were doing in the locker room after the series against Winnipeg.

A kid like that: young, probably gay, definitely in love with his center in some way that blurs all the lines, and used to being on a new team every other year, will take stability over cash any day of the week.

Steve is legally obligated to bring potential contracts to his players. Augustin signs the deal the next day, and when he shakes Hollis’ hand, he cheekily says in French: “I could have held out for more money.”

Hollis doesn’t say that he knows, but he does. He’s a businessman. It’s only ever a bonus when players want to stay. The contract details are made public the next day, and nobody likes it: the fans wanted a longer term, the business heads scoff at the no-movement clause. But Augustin gets to say he took a pay cut to stay, and nobody being happy is just the sign of a good deal.

He gambled on a potential franchise player that would bring the team to a higher calibre, a height that they never could have otherwise reached. He doesn’t expect to get a leader, a protector, a player in his prime with enough wisdom to counteract the hotheaded vitriol of the youngest team in the league by average age. He doesn’t expect magic.

One trade, and he’s bought himself the best team in the league and continuing job security in one of the most capricious businesses in the world. He’s one series away from buying himself a Stanley Cup with it.

So as he watches Augustin Berenger score the game-winning goal in overtime off of a miraculous pass from Kent Parson that sends them sailing past the broken dream of last season, he thinks, not a bad bet after all.

It’s a different kind of brutality, to lose in the first game of the Finals series. Someone has to do it, and it’s a fifty percent chance that it’ll be you, and somehow, you can never prepare for it.

Kent takes a puck to the ankle at the end of the second and spends the period break having it prodded for fractures. He presses a clenched fist to his forehead and thinks between the jabs of pain about how far he’s willing to take this. How much of himself that he’s willing to sacrifice not for himself, not for his own victory, but so that his whole team can lift that Cup.

A shadow falls over his face. He expects it to be Augustin, but it’s just Frank, “So, I have good news and bad news.”

The good news is not “we can magically make all the pain disappear and also make you invincible.” The good news is that his leg isn’t broken, just bruised to hell and hard to put weight on. Good thing he’s not particularly heavy.

The bad news is that the period started without him, and when he emerges from the tunnel to the roar of the crowd and the raucous cheers of his team, they’re down by two with only ten minutes left to carry them through. Kent has a thousand statistics about Stanley Cup Finals wins and losses whirling through his head as Augustin meets him at the gate and they skate towards the faceoff in their own end.

“Your ankle?” Augustin asks.

“Does it really matter?” Kent replies, and Augustin just snorts as they get ready for the face-off. The nagging pain causes him to miscalculate, and they wave him out of the circle. Augustin replaces him with a grimace.

“Berenger wins it back to Frisk, who carries it around to dish it up to Smith, Smith up the ice covered by- a pass across to Berenger, Berenger takes it in, around, shot on goal goes wide, Parson picks it up- SCORES! Kent Parson, thirty seconds after emerging from the tunnels after a tough shot to the ankle, and the Aces are within one with ten minutes to go in the third.”

They still lose, but everyone fights to the bitter end, clawing them into overtime only for Scraps to let in a beautiful shot that nobody saw coming. Everyone looks at Kent like a powder keg about to go off, but he can’t help the hope that wells in his chest even as they troop off dejected and bitter.

Six more games. Four more wins. There are worse odds, and he’s beaten them before.

“We’ll get ‘em next time,” he says, and he means it.

Devon Smith never thought that he was going to make it this far.

His story is a lot like other stories: he’s born into a relatively well-off family, who can afford to get him new gear every time he shoots up a few inches, and drive him to practices and games. He plays in Michigan until he’s old enough to declare draft eligibility, and the Aces snap him up late in the first round. He bakes on their AHL team for a year before being pulled up to the main roster.

His story is a lot like other stories, except for the inescapable ways that it’s not.

His dad sits him down when he’s twelve and asks him: “Are you really sure about this hockey thing?”

Football—the sport that his brothers play, that his father played—is a noble sport. But it’s all heat bearing down and grass squeaking beneath cleats and the slow slide of tectonic plates against each other until the sudden shift that triggers an earthquake. Hockey is entirely different, with its inhuman speed and cold rushes of wind, and something almost supernatural. It’s the closest to magic that he’ll ever be.

Being the youngest of four sons, he needs all the magic he can get.

All of his brothers go D1 before he even turns sixteen, and two of them are playing professionally by the time the University of Michigan offers him a spot on their roster; one in the Canadian league, the other just starting out in the sticky heat of Atlanta. America doesn’t care about the fourth Smith sibling, who plays the fourth most popular sport in the country. The camera crews that come by the house are always for his father, the local high school football coach who raised four athletes, but only three who matter.

A lot can change in a summer. In the summer of 2016, two things happen: Devon Smith is drafted twenty-ninth overall by the Las Vegas Aces, and his older brother Damien, the third youngest Smith and most promising linebacker in college football, gets his fifth concussion.

Suddenly, the Smith sibling that nobody cares about is Damien, who gets head-splitting migraines every other day, can’t sit in the sun anymore because of the brightness, and spends the year he was supposed to make his NFL debut in a dark, cool room seeing colours drift across his vision. Devon wants to stay behind, and the Aces let him choose; stay in Michigan to finish school, or join them in Nevada. He gets two weeks to decide.

His mom and dad tell him to go, but it’s not until Damien agrees with them that Devon tells Hollis St. Martin that he’ll see him in Reno.

Here’s the hard truth: Darnell plays in the Canadian league, whose trophy means nothing to Americans. Dakota is going to be cut from his team in the next couple of years because he has a lingering knee injury and he’s not nearly as good as Damien was. Damien was supposed to be their family’s chance at greatness, and he can’t even get out of bed some days. Now, the Smith family’s only chance at true athletic success is the youngest son, currently lying in wait in the minor league of a sport that they have never cared about.

Once he leaves, Devon doesn’t go home often, where his father bemoans the dying careers of his oldest sons to their faces, and Damien’s face crumples from both the brightness of the kitchen lights and the things their father says. Dakota doesn’t go home if he can help it. Darnell doesn’t go home at all. It breaks their mother’s heart, so Devon goes home when he can, but she always chooses her husband at the end of the day, so he always leaves before long.

Damien can’t watch the television screen during hockey games. All the white hurts his eyes, but he listens to Devon’s AHL games on the radio from his room in the basement, tuning into the local Reno radio stations through his laptop as he struggles to find jobs that don’t require strenuous movement or bright light. He texts Devon about the games sometimes, not an ounce of envy in his words, and Devon could weep from gratitude.

Proud of you is what he gets from his brothers when the Reno Gunslingers are eliminated from the Calder Cup playoffs in the second round. You’ll get them next time.

Is the season over yet? is what he gets from his father, your mother is asking.

The next year, he gets put on the first line with Kent Parson and Augustin Berenger, two of the best players in the world, right out of the minors. It’s practically unheard of, and Devon spends the first half of that season struggling to just keep up and earn his place. He expects Kent and Augustin to be disappointed by him, but neither of them even seems to consider it. Augustin prepares him sheets of carefully written notes on plays and improvements, Kent stays late after every practice with him, and when Devon gets his Calder nomination, they’re the first people he tells after his brothers.

“No fucking shit,” Augustin mutters, even though he’s smiling slightly. Kent’s grin is bright enough to power the entire fucking arena.

His dad suddenly starts calling him regularly, but he doesn’t pick up when he thinks he can get away with it. He does pick up Damien’s calls.

“Now, what the hell is icing again?”

And Devon always explains, because Damien used to eat, breathe, and sleep football, and now he can’t bear to watch or even listen to it. He takes Damien to the NHL Awards, even though he loses. Damien spends the night talking to the best players in the world, and spends the car ride back to Devon’s new apartment chattering about offsides and goalie interference. It’s nice to see him care about something again.

This year, Devon plays on the same line while the rest of the team shuffles to accommodate the new arrivals and old departures, because Kent insists on it while Augustin looms all dark and threateningly behind his short blond frame. During the Fathers’ trip in February, his dad can’t make it; Dakota has a game in Detroit. He doesn’t think anyone will come until Damien texts him: are you going to pick me up from the airport or what?

The Fathers’ trip goes great: Bad Bob Zimmermann, who comes along for Kent to the sheer delight of the rest of the team, and Augustin’s father Jean are so intensely Canadian that Damien doesn’t have to suffer the questions about his cruelly-murdered career like he does in the States, and when Damien has a migraine attack the morning before the game, Kent exercises his arcane captaincy powers once more to get Devon out of the pre-game practice and warmups.

“It’s fine, Smitty,” he says, patting Devon on the shoulder when he tries to apologize, “Never apologize for shit like this. Family comes first.”

Damien recovers in time for the game, and when Devon comes off the ice sweating and panting with exertion, there’s a light in Damien’s eyes that hasn’t been there for almost two years now, “What a fucking game.”

The Aces are Devon’s family as much as his brothers are. He loves them all; not just because they’re his team, but because they’re a gritty young team that nobody believes in until they do the impossible. They’re going to do it. They’re going to get it. He knows, because he did.

They win Game Two against Boston in overtime, and when the journalists ask him why he gave up the chance to score the game-winning goal for Kent, he just grins. It’s the kind of question his dad would ask. The great shining hope of the Smith family, close enough to a trophy to smell the metal, isn’t doing it for glory, and he wants everyone to know it. Glory doesn’t matter. Brothers aren’t always blood.

“Family comes first.”

In hockey there are no tied games, and in the playoffs there are no shootouts. The record for the most overtime periods in a single playoff game is seven. One hundred and fourteen extra minutes of playing time, over two games’ worth. You’d think someone who loves hockey as much as Kent does would jump on the opportunity.

Right now, he’s too busy trying not to throw up to confirm or deny.

He’s already getting more ice time than normal, he’s dropped ten pounds in this playoffs run alone, and it’s taking everything in him and then some to haul his way through every shift. The third and fourth lines are getting more time proportionally now that they’re in the thick of the second overtime, but nobody on either team is energetic enough to score anymore. They’re all just waiting to see who fucks up first.

Fans are trickling steadily out of the stadium as their parking expires and the transit system inches towards closing for the night. The lactic acid in his legs burns. It’s times like these, the slog reminiscent of bag skates, that he wonders why he does this, why anyone does this. Why they’re all so willing to destroy their bodies for the sake of a game.

It’s times like these when he forgets what it feels like to win.

The Bruins score on a face-off when he isn’t on the ice, so jarringly fast compared to the utter sludge of a game that’s been going on up until this point that it’s really nobody’s fault, and everyone is so relieved to be done that they don’t even remember to be upset that they’ve lost.

When they get back to the hotel, all Kent can do is collapse onto the bed and hope to God that his legs work in the morning.

“Ow,” Augustin mutters beside him, still fully-clothed when Kent’s head hits his thigh. It twitches slightly, and not in a fun way, “Fuck you, that hurt.”

“Tired,” Kent yawns, “Tomorrow, no practice. Just massage therapy and sleep.”

A hand winds its way lazily through his hair, “No vomiting?”

Kent sighs, “No vomiting.”

They’re silent for a bit longer before Augustin miserably says, “I hate the fucking Bruins.”

Before Kent Parson was the hero of every young hockey player in America, he was Beth Parson’s hero.

She is six years younger than him, a surprise baby, so her first hazy memories are of him at nine years old, towing her around the local pool at the Y over and over as she giggles and shrieks, duck floaties keeping her head above water. In her little mind, he is a prince and a knight all in one, and in his hockey gear, even more so. He jousts, he slays dragons. She knows even before she knows what hockey is and how it works that her brother is something special.

She has no memories of her father, but she has Kent. Sometimes, it’s not enough, but she can’t imagine how hard it would be without him until it happens.

Hockey is not what makes Kent special. For a short while, she hates the sport, because it’s the thing that takes him away from her. That is, until she goes to Quebec and meets Jack Zimmermann, the sheepish boy who makes her brother smile so widely his face should split in two, and watches the two of them carve up the ice in glittering lines and sprays of sparkling snow. If hockey brings him Jack and that sort of joy, it must be worth it. She cheers them on, the two of them, her knights in shining armour. King Arthur and Lancelot.

Beth is twelve when Jack Zimmermann overdoses, and her mother patiently explains to her exactly what that means. It’s hard to hide the cruel truths of the world from a little girl who can’t remember meeting her dad. She feels sympathy until she overhears her mother on the phone with Kent.

“Why won’t he call me?” he weeps. Her fingers clench the door frame as her mother attempts to soothe him. Her brother doesn’t cry. She sees him on the TV all the time, smiling and flashy in the glitz and glamour of the desert. He’s a grown man. It makes no sense. “I miss him, Mom, fuck, I miss him. Why would he just leave me like this? Why does he hate me? All I wanted…I just wanted him to live.”

She hates Jack Zimmermann for a short while too. She spitefully thinks about her King Arthur and Lancelot comparisons; her brother the hero, destined for glory, and Jack, the esteemed knight who betrays his greatest friend. When she brings the allegory up to Kent one night after his Calder-winning season, he drops a glass in the sink, turning to her with fire in his eyes, “Don’t ever fucking say that again.”

It’s the only time she can remember him ever making her cry.

Kent’s not a hero, she learns as she becomes a teenager just as he leaves it behind. Kent is a mess of emotions, just like anyone, and the two emotions which burn the brightest are his craving for connection and his terror of being known. He has friends, but his smiles around them are never fully real. He has fans, but he’s a caricature to them. He has hockey, his only real lifelong companion since the other one stopped taking his calls, and it's the one that leaves his skin mottled with bruises and bleeding cuts.

She tells him not to go to Samwell that day, and he goes anyway. He comes back seething and heartbroken, and she realizes at fifteen years old that her brother has never learned how to love without hurting himself.

But they all get older. They all learn. Kent plays season after season of hockey, and only ever gets better and better at it. Beth throws herself into her stories, her knights and dragons, and comes out the other end with a high school diploma.

Her admissions advisor tells her to write about her dead dad. She tells him to kick rocks and writes her college essay about the beautiful warfare that is hockey; the sport she loves because it is inseparable from Kent, and hates because of what it does to him. It pays off when the acceptance email from Princeton arrives.

“What the fuck are you even talking about?” Kent says incredulously when she brings up visiting a bank for loans, and pays her deposit in full the next day.

He plays season after season of hockey, and she watches with bated breath as he starts to fall out of love with that, too. He skates through injuries as he strives for the shiny silver Cup he won once when she was thirteen and the bright lights and confetti were like magic to her. He skates through loneliness, through pain mental and physical, until the day they decide to reboot his team and she thinks that he might break.

She should have had more faith. Augustin Berenger comes to Vegas, and she gets to watch her brother fall in love again, twice in one season.

Hockey is not what makes Kent special. Kent is special because he loves more and deeper than anyone else that she knows, in a way that is almost impossible to fathom in words. It seeps from his skin, from his eyes, so much of it that he doesn’t know what to do with it. He loves in a way that can only hurt him, because what doesn’t hurt when you pull it out by the roots?

She watches now, the same age that he was the first time that he won his Grail, as he charges across the ice: helmet on, visor set, hands clenched around the lance of his stick as he forces his way onwards. She knows a lot more about King Arthur now, his imperfections and legend, and most importantly, that Arthur wasn’t the hero in every story.

That doesn’t make him any less of a hero in hers.

She leaps to her feet and screams when he makes that last, desperate shot, and it sinks deep into the back of the net. While her friends celebrate around her, she watches his face on the screen as the Boston crowd groans and seethes with disappointment: the sheer glowing light in his eyes, a smile like the sun, arms lifted high and wide. Her knight in shining armour.

“Kent Parson takes the pass, nearly loses it, gets it back- SCORES! Kent Parson scores the game-ending goal with thirty-five seconds left in overtime, and the series is tied at two!”

Every team has a heart. It’s not inherently the best player, not the most talented. It’s the player that you follow to war. It’s the person you look to when your team wins, and who looks for you when the team loses. It beats because of this game, and if you cut it out, the team withers without it.

The heart of the Aces could be any single one of these players in the dressing room, soaking up the sweat and grime of another overtime defeat. They all love it enough. That’s why they’re going to win it all. On any other team, they would be it; ask the Aeros about Kevin Mitsuya, Samwell about William Poindexter, the Schooners about Henrik Ahlgren and Jakob Frisk. Ask them what happened when those players were gone, and they’d shake their heads and lament the loss.

But if you asked any single one of these players who the heart of their team is, they would all say Kent Parson, the patron saint of Las Vegas hockey, the patron saint of underdog stories, the patron saint of last stands and contradictions. Not because he’s the best, even though he is. Not because he’s the smartest, or the most talented.

But because without him, the room is silent and airless.

Augustin does press and doesn’t say anything to the team as they get undressed. It’s not his place. Kent’s not angry or depressed this time. He’d stalked off the ice like a man on a mission and disappeared somewhere into the coach’s office still clad in all his gear. Only his helmet remains perched on the seat of his bench, black and shiny.

“Plane tomorrow,” he reminds the rookies quietly as they file out of the somber mausoleum that is their home dressing room, “Dex, can you give Jem a ride back to my place?”

“You sticking around here?” Dex asks, his brow furrowing slightly. He doesn’t seem to be taking the loss or the looming threat of elimination with as much terror as the others are. Lando and Jem are both sallow with it, and Wally is still sweating.

Augustin nods, “Don’t wanna abandon Parson this late at night. He might fling himself from the rafters, or buy his cat another horrifyingly ugly cat tree.”

“Sure,” Dex agrees, a small smile tugging at the side of his mouth, “Hey, on the plane tomorrow, d’you mind going over tape of my second period? I want to make sure none of those dicks are getting by me next time.”

Augustin makes a considering face. Four games and the New England native is firmly anti-Bruins, as all proper members of society ought to be. “D’you mind fixing my toaster oven?”

“You just need to pop out the dial and screw it back- you know what? Sure,” Dex says, and Augustin pats him on the back as the rookies ship out: Dex and Wally back to Jeff’s house to wage war on the Homeowners Association, and Jem to relish solitude (play chess against himself) in Augustin’s apartment.

Augustin waits until everyone else is gone too, offering what little he can. They’d all played well, better than well, but at the end of the day, Boston had the edge. He’s kicking himself about stupid choices as much as the rest of them, but he has his game tapes and his notebooks, and he sees the light at the end of the tunnel even if others don’t.

Kent is in the tape-viewing room when Augustin finally goes looking for him, still fully dressed in his gear. The tunnels are empty of press, and above them, the arena is dark and quiet where it was fuming and roaring an hour prior. He walks in to find Wilson standing there too, suit jacket tossed over one of the plastic folding chairs as they both lean over a whiteboard.

“Uh, hey,” Augustin says, for lack of better words, “I’m not sure if you noticed, but the game ended a while ago.”

“Are you here to collect him?” Wilson asks mildly, his bald head shining under the lights as he watches Kent draw something up. “Thank Christ, he reeks.”

“Parson,” Augustin doesn’t like to patronize Kent, but his voice softens slightly as he approaches, “You gotta get out of your gear before you get trench foot or a flesh-eating bacteria-”

“Did you know that the Memorial Cup is the hardest trophy to win in hockey?” Kent interrupts, capping his whiteboard marker. Augustin blinks and wonders for a moment if this loss has finally driven his boyfriend off his fucking rocker. Of all the losses, it’s probably the most valid one he could have chosen, but they still have two more games left.

“Yeah. I know.”

“We’ve both won it. Two different teams from the Q, back to back. Do you know how rare that is?” Kent clicks his tongue, “I had one of the numbers guys do the math, and then I forgot the actual number, but it’s rare.”

Augustin sort of wishes that brutally angry silent-treatment Kent or sad hot-shower Kent would come back, because at least he knows how to fucking deal with those two, “Okay.”

“You played center in Rouyn-Noranda, and I played left-wing in Rimouski.”

Patience is a virtue, and Augustin isn’t particularly virtuous. He’s sticky, he’s tired, he’s pissed off now that the adrenaline is fading, and he forgets for a moment that their goddamn coach is in the room when he says, “Are you narrating my life’s journey, you crazy fucking weirdo, or do you actually have a goddamn point?”

“I want you to play center next game,” Kent says, leaning over the whiteboard. Wilson’s not saying anything, arms crossed over his torso as they always are. Augustin takes that in slowly. They’re both right-handed shots, so they both play left-wing, when they’re not in the center. Kent wants him to play a position he’s only ever played in practice or when Kent’s out of the lineup since he joined the Aces, in Game Six of the Stanley Cup Finals, while they’re on the brink of elimination.

He says, “You’re out of your gourd.”

“I’m very in my gourd,” Kent replies, barely even listening to Augustin as he erases the whiteboard and starts scribbling on it again, handwriting illegible and lines shaking.

“You gonna say anything about this?” Augustin asks Wilson, who shrugs.

“You wanna tell him no when he’s fucking like this?”

“You’re his boss, Mike.”

“Hey, I ain’t got no strings on me,” Kent says, a small fracture in his strange, intense demeanour, “I’m serious. I want to scare the shit out of the fuckers. We need to win these next two games, and I want to come out of the gate swinging. I want them to fucking crumble.”

“Kent, you’ve been a center for eight years,” Augustin says exasperatedly. Kent looks up and bares his teeth into a smile.

“Are you saying I’m better than you at it?”

The center directs the play, commands the flow, and Augustin knows he’s exceptional at it, but there’s exceptional and then there’s whatever the fuck kind of innate hockey sense that Kent has. The only reason he never played center in Juniors was because of Zimmermann’s ability to contain and direct his teenage fervour. Now that Kent can contain it himself, he’s practically unstoppable. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Kent nods, and Augustin sighs. Of course he does. He aims another look at Wilson as if to say, last chance to avert disaster.

Wilson just looks back at him, not a single emotion in his crinkled brown eyes. It’s two games that mean everything to everyone in the room. There’s never been a worse time to fuck around than right now, which is the only reason why Augustin’s still in the room entertaining this lunacy. The intensity in the air is enough to make anyone’s eyes water.

“Fine,” he finally says, “Now get out of your gear so I can stop taking suicide watch.”

“You get me out of my gear if you care so fucking much,” Kent retorts petulantly, even as he lays the marker down and rubs his eyes.

“Aw, Christ,” Wilson sighs, and walks out without another word. Augustin watches him go and something in his gut clenches, but he doesn’t say anything. Kent trails him doggedly out of the room, carefully flicking the lights off as they go.

This is a Kent that he hasn’t seen since the Huskies beat the Oceanic in the Q Finals in Augustin’s Memorial Cup year: sizzling focus, complete and utter hunger. There’s no other word for it. It eats the sorrow, the rage, the bitterness. There’s no room for anything else.

This is a Kent that can and will win at any cost, with any weapon, by any means.

Inside his chest, Augustin feels something wake up.

They’ve heard this song before.

The Bruins are on the brink of eliminating the Aces, the Original Six team from New England against the upstart desert expansion team. The Aces have lost three games now, half of their roster is injured in some way, and if they lose tonight, it’s another four months of nothing.

Kent ices his ankle before the game as he watches the uninjured players warm up with music and scowls on their faces. Augustin is nowhere to be found, and nobody’s in any state to find him and tell him to crawl out of his hidey-hole so that they can point a camera at his alarmingly photogenic face.

“Alright, Parse,” Frank says, coming in with a blue bottle and shaking it with a rattle, “It’s an hour to ice. Ibuprofen time.”

Kent can’t really take pills anymore. He lets people chirp him about his pill-splitter, because the alternative is telling them exactly why his throat still revolts against the sensation of swallowing medication. He smacks the top and the massive prescription-strength ibuprofen explodes into four pieces. Kent takes them gingerly, one by one, with massive gulps of water.

“How’s it feeling?” Frank asks as he peels off the ice pack. Kent shrugs. He doesn’t even really register the pain anymore, only the slight difference in how he has to tie his skates to accommodate the swelling. It’s not broken, barely even sprained, and it has nothing on the broken fingers or Augustin’s internal bruising and bleeding from last year.

Only one thought beats precariously through his brain. We have to win.

When is that not a thought in his head?

Augustin emerges from his cavern as Kent is strapping on his shin pads. They dress in slow, silent tandem, arms an inch apart as they tighten their skates, strap on their pads, exchange a look. A better boyfriend would kiss his lover’s knuckles and whisper sweet reassurance. Kent knows that they’re well past that point.

Wilson comes in and the team cheers loudly when he hands the starting lineup to Kent to read. Kent clears his throat, “Starting in goal, from the Windy City, number one in our hearts and his nonna’s, Vittorio Scarpello!”

He gets chirped all the time for his dramatic reading of the lineup, but it’s his way of dedicating this to someone, of showing them he knows who they are, that he sees who they are.

“Starting in defence, our dynamic duo from the mean streets of Europe, Allie and Frisky!”

Petal hoots in agreement, and Wally drums his hands against the bench loudly. Allie and Frisk high-five without looking at each other, drawing a laugh from the nervous, tense locker room. Kent grins as he turns back to the paper.

“Starting on the right, from the banks of Lake Michigan, our lean, mean hitting machine, Smitty!”

Flicker and Dex give Smitty’s shoulder pads solid smacks as the rest of the team chants his name, quieting down as Kent clears his throat purposefully. The air is so thick with their hunger that he could almost reach out and touch it.

“Starting in the center, from the Baie-Comeau community theatre, Augustin Berenger!”

Petal’s little, “Wait, what?” is lost in the loud, slightly confused cheering as Jeff pats Augustin on the back and the rest of the team exchanges looks. Kent grins as he crumples up the paper and rolls it between his palms until it’s nothing.

“And then on the left, me.”

Wilson steps in and gives them a short, energetic spiel about playing their best game, but everyone keeps looking over at Augustin, sitting with his eyes closed and head leaned back against the wall of his cubby. Outside, Kent can vaguely hear the Boston faithful chanting for their team. He wonders if that’s what Augustin’s hearing as well.

Spite’s a powerful motivator.

“Anything to add, captain?” Wilson tosses back to him. Kent chews the inside of his cheek. What else is there to add? They want to win, they have to win. For themselves, for each other, for every fucking asshole who never believed in them and every faithful person who always did. But they all know all of that.

“Let’s have some fun with it, eh?” he says instead. The team looks at each other, muttering, and Kent arches his eyebrows at them, “I said, let’s have some fucking fun!”

Smitty whoops, and Lando drums his hands against his chest pads in a steady beat. The team troops out one by one, and Augustin is last, like always, ducking out onto the ice with narrowed eyes and fire crackling under his skin. He hasn’t made a word of complaint or doubt since their talk with Wilson, just spent hours poring over tapes: old Bruins games, his own Rouyn-Noranda games, whatever Rimouski tapes he can dig up.

Kent watches the sheer surprise on the Bruins’ center’s face when Augustin is the one who meets him at center ice, and smiles to himself. His limbs hum, and his pain is minimal. It might as well not exist.

Let’s have some fucking fun.

“Berenger taking the face-off, an odd choice on the part of head coach Mike Wilson in this elimination game, but the Aces have never played a particularly traditional game. Parson’s on the wing as the players line up. One of these teams might be lifting the Cup at home tonight, but not if the Aces have anything to say about it. Berenger wins the face-off, and we’re off to the races.”

It goes to seven, because all the best finals series go to seven.

They’ll be talking about this one for ages: how Boston and Vegas went blow for blow, with a combined six periods of overtime over seven games. The goalies are exhausted, the players are about to topple over like dominos, and yet they just keep on fighting. That’s hockey, baby. There’s only three options: you go until you’re a victor, a loser, or dead.

Kent doesn’t watch the seconds tick down: they’re too busy trying to keep the Bruins away while also attempting to get the puck into the empty net at the other end of the ice. Everything hurts: his lungs are screaming, his legs are dying, and his heart is beating so hard that he tastes blood in the back of his throat. He slides and the puck slams into his stomach, the pain blending into the rest of his body as he gets back up and keeps going.

It’s only when Augustin barrels into him two seconds before the buzzer goes that he realizes what they’ve done. They’ve won the Stanley fucking Cup, it’s theirs forever. They will forever be the 2019 Stanley Cup champions.

The pile of Aces by their own net is a crush of bodies, sweat, and sheer blistering joy. Helmets go flying, and so do gloves and sticks, a confetti of gear that rains down alongside the smoke and paper and raucous cheers of their arena blowing apart. Kent is crushed on all sides, squashed into a single entity that is the screaming Las Vegas Aces.

Petal screams something incoherent in his ear, and Makela is shouting in Swedish as they jump up and down in a horde. He doesn’t know where he ends and where they begin, and for that moment, it doesn’t matter. He is them, they are him, a many-limbed creature that bleeds euphoria and sweats victory.

They’ve won it.

There’s plasticky confetti in his mouth and sweat dripping down his nose when Augustin finds him again, Smitty hanging onto his shoulders like an overgrown backpack. Kent can’t hear anything in the sheer cacophony, but he feels the vibration of Augustin’s laughter when the dark-haired genius who doesn’t know how to properly smile wraps his arms around Kent’s torso in a hug so tight that there’s suddenly air under his skates.

Kent buries his nose in the crook of Augustin’s neck, and says, “We won.”

He doesn’t know if Augustin hears, but he does hear and feel the laugh that he lets out this time, a cry of sheer joy that makes Kent feel like he’s flying. A laugh bubbles up in his own chest. He can’t stop smiling. Maybe he’ll never stop. But he’s here, he’s twenty-five and he’s won his second Stanley Cup.

The handshake line flies by, and Kent makes sure to tell every single Bruin, no matter how much he hates their team, how fucking well they all played. He wants them to know, because it’s not worth winning if you don’t earn it, and by God, did they make the Aces earn it.

Kent gets pulled away to receive the Conn Smythe, which he privately wishes he could cut into pieces and distribute to his team evenly. They did this together. They could have done this without him if they needed to, and that’s why they finally won. That’s how they know that they’ve earned it.

Hats are shoved onto their heads, clamping onto their sweaty hair. The commissioner makes them calm down just enough so that he can give a speech, and Kent relishes the boos that they give him as he stands in a line with his team, the grooves of the Conn Smythe still bruising his palms. Jeff’s arm is heavy around his shoulders, and Augustin’s arm is tight around his waist, his own arms trapped by their torsos as they hungrily watch the Cup, their Cup make its way out of the tunnel and onto the table.

“To receive the Stanley Cup, the Finals MVP and captain of the Las Vegas Aces, Kent Parson.”

Last time they won, they had no captain. Hairball had received it as the older alternate, and Kent had gotten it second. This time, he’s so giddy that he almost forgets to shake the commissioner’s hand and pose for the camera. The cold metal burns his hands. His muscles ache. His heart sings.

And then he fucking lifts it to the rafters and screams.

The team echoes his victory cry, jumping up and down like little kids as he carts the Cup around the rink. The weight that has haunted him like a ghost echoes down his arms, corporeal at last. The noise of the stadium has almost deafened him, until all he can hear is his heartbeat thrumming through his limbs as he carries the Cup back over to his team, where everyone is elbowing Augustin, Swoops shoving him forward to receive the greatest prize in hockey.

The night before this, a thousand years ago, Augustin had quietly said into his collarbone: “When you lift it, don’t give it to me like you said you would.”

Kent had been half-asleep, but that had woken him up, “What? Why?”

Augustin yawned, his chapped lips whispering over Kent’s skin. His words were muddled and thick, “‘Cause the others have been working for it longer than me. Cross and Troy and Scraps and them. Give it to one of them first.”

He fell asleep before Kent could tell him, they’d give it to you, too. You’ve been working for it longer than any of us.

For years, he never understood why Jack did it. Why Jack, who was so anxious and meticulous and worried about how things looked, decided to throw it all out the window and lock lips with his boyfriend in the middle of the biggest celebration in hockey with a thousand cameras pointed at his face.

He hands Augustin the Cup, sheer elation pouring off of both of them in waves as confetti rains down from on high and thinks, I understand now.

For the brief moment their hands brush against the silver, they are at the pinnacle of existence. He relishes the feeling of it: they’ll only be here once or twice more in their lives.

He doesn’t end up making a move. Augustin skates around the arena with the Cup hoisted high over his head, cheering so raucously that he looks like an ancient warrior on the battlefield, claiming glorious victory. He was second in the running for the Art Ross this year, and Kent was third, and nobody will ever mention the fucking Aeros around him again, because he is one of the best players in the fucking world and he’ll always be remembered as an Ace.

Kent watches as he whispers something against the metal and then kisses the Cup. He can still taste the cold metal and divots of inscribed names on his own mouth as Augustin returns and hands the Cup to Cross, staring at his vacant hands in abject wonder as the grooves fade from his bare palms.

“Je l’ai fait,” he says weakly, a smile bleeding across his face. Kent knows what that means, as illiterate in French as he is. I did it.

He slams back into Augustin, nearly sending him to the ice as he knocks the breath out of his lungs. They’re hugging in the middle of center ice, and Kent can feel the shaking laughter on his face. Dear Jack. I understand now. I fucking get it.

They get pulled away from each other by their families, and Kent thinks they might as well have cut off his arm, but he goes with the squeeze of Augustin’s hand around his own echoing against his skin.

“You fucking did it!” Beth screams in his ear, hanging from his neck like a koala. His mom is too busy crying to say anything, and when she presses her face to his sweaty gear, she sobs:

“Your father would be so fucking proud of you, Kent.”

And yeah, maybe Kent starts crying a bit about that, too.

Eventually, he gets pulled away from them as well, to take an interview with ESPN. One turns into two, and then what feels like ten, and when Kent has done a thousand interviews where he can’t stop smiling for the life of him, his mother and Beth are still there waiting for him with Augustin’s parents, all of them laughing except for Augustin’s scandalized mother as they look up at the jumbotron.

Kent looks up too, and can’t help himself from laughing up a storm. It seems he’s not the only one struck with the aphrodisiac of victory; Jeff and Angelique are eating face amid the crush of bodies at center ice for the whole world to see.

“Well, that’s one way to announce a relationship,” Kent’s mom laughs, and Augustin’s father joins in, great heaving huffs of laughter as Jeff and Angie look up and turn the colour of a tomato. Angelique buries her smiling face in Jeff’s shoulder as Jeff grins madly and waves at the cheering crowd.

Kent feels a warmth against his side, and looks up to see Augustin with an arm around his shoulders, pulling him in as tightly as he can. His headband is gone and someone, probably his mom, has wiped the eyeliner off of his cheeks and undereyes, so all that’s left are the thin traces of black clinging to his lashes.

“We fucking did it,” he laughs breathlessly, so weightless and effervescent that he seems as though he’ll never come down from this. Kent feels it well up inside of him. He has it again, hockey’s greatest prize, his name will be on it two rows below Augustin’s.

“We fucking did it,” he replies, “I fucking love you.”

If the mics pick it up, they will dismiss it as the bonds of a team in the heat of the moment. Across the ice, Frisk and Allie are yelling it at each other so violently and in so many languages that there’s very little chance that they’ll be heard at all.

“I love you, too,” Augustin tells him, and a hand glances brazenly off of his cheek before they’re being ripped apart for the massive team picture with the Cup. Kent slides in between Swoops and Cross, puts up one finger, and his voice goes rough from screaming.

They’re on the ice for what seems like hours. Kent sticks with his mom and sister, taking interview after interview, and laughing as they put Scraps’ little baby into the basin of the Cup, skating by to plop an Aces Championship hat on the baby’s head. He ambushes Augustin again during an interview by flinging himself onto his back, and the interviewer ends up getting nothing out of either of them as they double over with insane, overjoyed laughter, hugging like they want to crawl inside each others’ equipment.

They do, but nobody has to know.

There’s a bunch of Samwell alumni on the ice surrounding Dex and his equally ginger parents: Jack, Bittle, Chris Chow, and the new defenceman for the Coyotes’ AHL team, Derek Nurse. Jack makes eye contact with him and smiles, Bittle whipping his head around to see why. Kent lifts a hand to wave, and feels something off-kilter in his gut when both of them wave back. He doesn’t tell Jack about his revelation underneath the Cup, but he’s sure that Jack knows. Bittle certainly does, if his cheeky grin is any indication.

Dex and Nurse have their arms around each other, both of their smiles dopey and massive, and Kent smiles to himself. Nobody can replace your first love, or your best D-partner, whichever comes first.

Eventually, someone pushes the Cup back into his hands and has him bear it into the dressing room, where he gets so saturated with champagne that he can feel it seeping in through his skin. He was nineteen the last time this happened, and he’s gotten worse at handling his liquor somehow, but he still opens his mouth for the rain of bubbly, tongue out like he’s catching snowflakes. When he turns around sodden with it, Augustin’s pupils are so huge and dark that Kent needs to get out of his equipment immediately.

They drench each other in champagne, and then someone gets out an electric razor and hands it to the only sober person in the room to start shearing off people’s playoff beards in the showers. The team cheers as Augustin scrapes his face free of the playoff beard and grabs Wally next.

“Let’s do your girlfriend a favour, Greenwall!”

When they finally get to Kent, most people have moved on to the novelty of drinking more champagne out of the Cup, and actually getting out of their sweaty, wine-soaked gear. Kent feels the electric razor buzz along his cheeks, but more than that, he feels Augustin’s fingers along his neck, under his jaw, and the desire blowing through him is so far beyond obscene that there’s no word to describe it.

The razor clicks off, but the hand stays where it is. Augustin whispers in his ear, “When we get home tonight, what are the odds that we’re going to get any sleep?”

His whisper is warm and self-satisfied, like he knows Kent’s answer before he says it: “If I can fucking help it, none.”

“Chéri, une fois que j'ai fini, tu ne te souviendrais plus de ton nom.”

And then the fucker walks away.

Kent runs after him, grabbing him just before he can turn the corner into the dressing room, and slams him against the wall. His fist curls in the collar of Augustin’s jersey as he yanks their mouths together, the champagne still clinging to his skin stinging the cut on his bottom lip.

“The cameras,” Augustin tries to say even as he kisses back fiercely, and then, “Whatever, fuck it.”

“Promise?” Kent tries to ask, but his mouth is somewhat preoccupied as he pins Augustin to the wall with his hips.

Their sodden jerseys hit the floor with a splat, followed by elbow pads and chest protectors. Kent doesn’t wear a shirt under his gear, and he’s just removing the barrier of Augustin’s neck guard with searing hands gliding up his damp skin, blood thrumming through his limbs until he can’t even think, when they’re finally interrupted.

“Yo, the press is gone so we can change, and I need a quick shower-” Cross says, walking in with his hair drenched and wearing only a pair of gym shorts. Kent yanks his mouth away, and they all three stare at each other for a second before Cross says, “Yeah, okay. This makes a lot of sense, actually.”

“Um,” Augustin says, hands still firmly gripping Kent’s waist, “So, we can explain-”

“Explain,” Cross echoes, and Kent’s stomach unravels slightly when his face grows a lopsided smirk, “Well, I mean, it does explain why Mitty gave Jem that bucket of earplugs at the start of the season. Mazel tov, or, um, whatever the Catholic equivalent of that is. Ave Maria?”

He sidesteps their discarded gear with a jaunty whistle on his way to the showers, and Kent doesn’t say anything about the fact that he’s still wearing pants as they gather their things and hightail it into the absolute carnage of a dressing room.

“GET ‘EM!”

More champagne drenches them from head to toe, and Kent can’t help but laugh as the rookies shake the Cup to get every last drop of alcohol onto his head. Augustin splutters madly, spitting the non-alcoholic champagne out of his mouth and brushing his wet hair away from his face. “Oh, you motherfuckers!”

Kent watches him chase Mitty and Jem out of the room, the two younger players screaming at the top of their lungs as they tear down the tunnel away from Augustin’s lumbering, half-dressed frame.

“Hey,” Scraps says, appearing at his elbow and grinning madly as he slings an arm around Kent’s bare shoulders, “Stop checking out Augustin’s ass and get changed so that we can celebrate.”

Kent shoves him off with a laugh, feeling lighter than air. Across the room, the lights wink at him off of the Cup’s silver rim.

Augustin hasn’t drunk a drop, but he’s high on sheer fucking joy. That’s their Cup. His Cup. It’s all his, it will have his name on it for generations.

Everyone else is shirtless for some reason, and drunk out of their fucking minds. Augustin’s been holding the Cup for twenty minutes now, and even though his arms are practically dead, he can’t bear to put the thing down. He’s not shirtless, but his damp, liquor-splattered white shirt is open, and Smitty and Ruben are trying to persuade him to lay across a table so they can do shots off of his abs.

“Don’t be a fucking prude, August,” his sister yells at him, herself absolutely sloshed, but he just lifts the Cup to distract everybody and a cheer goes up so loud that it nearly scrapes his ears clean. Vegas does know how to party. He’s pretty sure their bar tab is in the mid-hundred-thousands, that the whole club is verging on alcohol poisoning, and that Beth Parson is the dark-haired girl sloppily making out with Mitsuya in a dark corner. He doesn’t mention that last one out loud.

A hand loops around his waist, pressing flat and warm against the bottom of his bare stomach, and he turns to see Kent grinning drunkenly at him. “Come dance with me.”

Behind him, the dance floor is so packed that plausible deniability is everywhere. He could probably stick his hand down the front of Kent’s extremely tight pants with impunity at this rate, and nobody would bat an eye. So he kisses the Cup’s rim fondly, passes the trophy off to Cross and Keever who are sitting misty-eyed in the corner, and lets Kent tug him onto the dance floor by his belt loops.

He’s sober, but he sure doesn’t feel that way as they enter the crush of bodies that has them pressed chest to chest, hip to hip in the middle of the crowd. Halfway through the song, Kent loops his arms up and around Augustin’s neck, and with teeth barely brushing the shell of Augustin’s ear, says, “We fucking won.”

His words slur together, probably from the six vodka Red Bulls pulsing through his system right now, but Augustin couldn’t give less of a fuck. The club is hot and sweaty, and he grabs Kent by the hand, tugging him through the crowd and out into the back alley. The exposure to fresh air chills the sweat to his skin all at once, and he wonders how he must look as the door swings shut with a click, leaving them alone in the dark alley and Kent staring at him with wide eyes and blown-out pupils.

Kent’s mouth tastes like sugar and alcohol, sickeningly sweet as Augustin parts his lips and presses him against the shadowed brick wall of the club. There are a couple of girls smoking joints at the end of the alley that don’t seem to notice or care about the two of them making out against the wall, the panting noises Kent makes in his mouth as they part to breathe.

“Not here,” he says even as Augustin presses a leg between his thighs, fingers tight on his upper arms, “Not here, I want…I want to enjoy it. I want to remember it.”

“Yeah,” Augustin says hoarsely, even though he’s distracted by the redness of Kent’s lips and the gold of his hair, “Yeah, yeah.”

They separate just slightly, and Kent buttons Augustin’s shirt for him as he checks his phone. It’s one in the morning, and he has a thousand text messages. He wishes his parents good night and promises to get Angelique back safely to her hotel room, knowing full well that she’s going home with Jeff tonight. He fires a text back at Snowy, who wishes him congratulations in the most insulting and long-winded tirade possible. The air is sticky and hot.

“I changed my mind,” Kent says abruptly, and Augustin almost drops his phone on the ground in favour of closing back in. He can feel Kent’s pulse hammering in his throat, in his chest, the unsteady flutter of breath. If this is what victory is like, he’s going to cling to it forever. He’s going to remember this forever.

“Woah, okay,” a Southern voice says, and they part at the sound. Mitsuya is drunkenly laughing behind the unlikely trio of Smitty, Eric Bittle, and Jem standing in the club’s open doorway. Augustin has a lot of questions about why they’re together, why nineteen-year-old Jem’s the one carrying a bottle of top shelf bourbon, and why they’re all smiling. He doesn’t ask any of them.

“Twice!” Mitsuya pokes his head back out to shout at them, scaring the smokers down the alley away with the sheer volume of his voice, “This is twice now! I demand financial compensation!”

Augustin feels his eye twitch, “Hey, Parson, guess who Mitsuya was making out with-”

“No, no no no, I’m sorry! Do whatever you want, love is love!”

“Wait, so you guys are-” Smitty doesn’t finish his sentence, just gets all misty and before Augustin can blink, he has an arm wrapped around each of their necks as he giggles, “Oh my God, you are Mom and Dad.”

Help me, Augustin mouths at Bittle, struggling to extricate himself from Smitty’s weepy grasp. Bittle just snorts derisively and pulls Jem back inside.

“Wait, so, they’re neckin’-” is all that Augustin hears Jem say before the music covers his voice. He thinks that maybe this is the moment they’ll actually get to explain what’s going on, until reinforcements arrive.

“Smitty, why are you-” Ruben crashes out the door followed by Bloom and McCandles. Augustin sees his drunk face twitch under the single light glowing above the door, “What the fuck is going on out here?”

“We’re all one big happy family,” Smitty sniffles, and when Kent manages to wriggle out, it’s very obvious from his red mouth and the hickey starting to bloom beneath the collar of his shirt what was going on.

Well, very obvious to everyone except Daniel McCandles, who’s clearly high as fuck right now.

“Okay, buddy,” Ruben says calmly, reaching out to pull Smitty off of Augustin. The weight disappears and Augustin sighs with relief, rolling his sore neck. He braces himself for Ruben’s disdain or disgust, but Smitty gloms onto Ruben, poking his cheek with a lazy finger, and the forward just shakes his head with a defeated sigh, “Fuckin’ thought it would be Allie and Frisk, frankly.”

“Yeah, eh?” Augustin says, because there’s a pretty big pot riding on the two defencemen making out, and he’s got twenty dollars in it. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“No, you’re not,” Ruben retorts, “But we’re doing shots, and you’re gonna be our table. Come on.”

Kent’s looking way too pleased at the idea of that, and Augustin can’t help but rib, “You know, for a guy who doesn’t like to hear about gay shit, you’re really intent on taking shots off of my abs.”

“I’m trying to be inclusive,” Ruben snipes back as the music gets loud enough to shake the bones in their skin, “Is that a crime? Are you going to call the internet social justice police on me?”

“Ugh, shut the fuck up, Ruben. You need to be more drunk,” Kent contributes with a dopey grin, before adding, “Okay, Gus, unbutton your shirt.”

“This is an HR violation,” Augustin retorts, but complies anyway as the rest of the crowd cheers. Why not? They just won the fucking Stanley Cup. He can have time to regret the videos tomorrow.

It’s four in the morning when the last few people are too drunk to even speak, and he helps get them into cabs. Kent is already gone, having promised to escort Beth back to her hotel. Augustin bundles a sleepy Jem into his taxi, and closes the door behind him. The ride is short, and Augustin has to frog-march Jem up the elevator and onto the couch. In the quiet, his ears ring slightly. He can still taste silver on his mouth.

“Thanks, Gus," Jem mutters drunkenly as Augustin covers him with a blanket and leaves a bucket, some painkillers and some water on the coffee table next to him. His Cajun French is barely intelligible, but Augustin manages to parse out, “By the way, I think I found out why you’re never in the apartment.”

He falls asleep before he can reveal his big revelation. Augustin just snorts as he locks the apartment door on his way out, and heads down to the garage.

He beats Kent to his own apartment, and lets himself in just as the horizon starts to take on the barest tint of purple and green. His entire body is leaden where it was once a livewire, and he nearly crashes headfirst into Kent’s bed when the sound of the door closing and feet padding towards him shocks him back awake.

“Fucking finally,” Kent hisses before Augustin can even turn around, and tackles him onto the bed.

He was drunk before, Augustin can taste the alcohol lingering in his mouth and on his skin, but he’s dead fucking sober now. In six hours they will be back at the rink for a press conference, where everyone except the two of them will be too hungover to talk, and they should sleep. But they won’t, because the Cup is theirs, and Augustin made a promise.

“It was your goal,” Kent says as Augustin unbuckles his belt, hands weaving through his hair, “Fuck, what a fucking beautiful goal, you won us that fucking game, I- shit.”

“Not mine,” Augustin pants when he has a chance, trailing his mouth along the inside of Kent’s thigh, “Ours.”

Kent has trouble staying still and quiet on a normal day, and tonight, both of their nerves are so alive that every touch is magnified. Augustin’s meticulous brain becomes a gift, as he files away the memories of what he sees and hears and feels: Kent’s arching neck, the strain of his chest as he curses and gasps for breath, the airy cut-off sighs as his hands wind and tug through Augustin’s hair and run down his spine, fingers burrowing into his hips hard enough to bruise.

Augustin thinks he could run around the world, he has the energy to keep going for hours, but eventually his body gives out on him and he lays back on the mattress with a groan as Kent maneuvers his way off of him. He feels sticky and disgusting, and he’s never been happier in his life. Beside him, Kent stares at the ceiling, chest heaving as he catches his breath. Augustin stares at him, though his face is half buried in the pillow.

Thank you, he thinks. For what, he can’t say. Everything, maybe.

He dozes off, but his eyes flutter open when Kent pushes a hand through his damp hair and gently cleans him up with a soft towel. All his little injuries are finally starting to hurt, but their pain is dulled as Kent rolls him onto his back and finishes up.

“Two-time Stanley Cup champion Kent Parson,” he says, watching the worn muscles of Kent’s bare torso shift in the moonlight as he tosses the towel into the hamper and clambers back into bed. The words roll off his tongue like they were meant to be. “Two-time Conn Smythe winner and Stanley Cup champion Kent Parson.”

“Stanley Cup champion and future Hart Memorial Trophy winner Augustin Berenger,” Kent replies, teeth grazing Augustin’s neck as he presses their bodies together. At this point, Augustin’s not exactly sure where all the bruises on his skin are from, but he’ll take the plausible deniability.

“Don’t jinx it,” he says. He’s got very stiff competition for his first Hart nomination, and it’s his first time in the running at twenty-seven years old. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up.

“Jinx it,” Kent snorts tiredly, “You already won the Rocket Richard, and the fucking Stanley Cup. You’re Stanley Cup champion Augustin Berenger, and if they don’t pick you, then they’re fucking stupid.”

He falls asleep almost immediately after that. Augustin cards his hair from his face, and thinks about all the things that came before this. How he hated Kent in the Q, how he suffered and fought and hid himself away like a turtle in its shell, letting teams kick him around as if he wasn’t worth anything. Would he give this up for a chance to do it all over again?

Only if it meant that he could do this sooner, and Jack Zimmermann can suck it for all he cares.

The sun begins to rise as his eyes flutter shut. Morbidly, he thinks about how the clock is ticking: the Aces can’t afford to renew Allie, Frisk, and Cross’s contracts all in one off-season, and Bloom and Smitty are going to be offer-sheeted by other teams without a doubt. The fabric of the team is going to change fundamentally yet again: at the very least, the Aces will lose their veteran alternate captain, or their best defensive pair. But for this shining, glowing moment, none of that matters. All that the world will remember ten years from now is that they all won together.

Kent snores, and at least that’s one thing Augustin can be sure of: people will come and go, but they’ll be here. More Cups or not, through re-signings and retirements and trades, they’ll be here together.