Chapter Text
You’re on the rush, two on one. Jumped up to join it, because fucked if the third line wingers can carry through the neutral zone and somebody’s gotta do it. You’re cruising, head up, puck on a string. CB’s far side and she’s stride for stride with you, both of you locked the fuck in and about to turn this into a two-on-oh. The one defensewoman who’s back… well, you’re about to take this chick’s lunch money. Shoulder drop, then through the legs on the deke. Pure brutality. Good night, ESPN Top Ten.
But then that one tiny winger, the one you’d seen wheeling below the goal line after the turnover, hopelessly far behind—
BANG.
You’re in the glass.
Your ears are ringing. One eardrum probably got crushed clean through your skull and into your parietal lobe, because you’re way too cool to tighten your fucking chinstrap and now your helmet’s a ten-ton press built of foam and plastic composite.
It was clean, shouts your spine, because you’re twenty-three going on forty-six from all the rough stuff in the corners and it’s holding a grudge.
Clean hit, mutters your shoulder as it slides back into its socket. It doesn’t always do that, not after three dislocations, so you’ll take that as a W.
Yep, she got us, says your knee as you slide down the boards like Wile E. Coyote and thump onto the ice. The knee’s just bruised, the doc will tell you later, but it’s fucking mad about it.
“That was dirty as fuck!” you yell at the closest ref as soon as you get your breath back. Play’s been whistled dead. Off to your left, a couple of somebodies are wrestling, gloves still on; you spot CB’s blonde tresses whipping around. She probably just wanted an excuse to fuck shit up.
You roll over, still flat on the ice, and find somebody watching you. Little scrap of a thing almost lost in all her gear, bent at the waist with her stick propped against her knees, staring straight down into your eyes. Logically, she must be an innocent bystander—except for two things.
One, she’s wearing a black sweater, and you’re wearing a white one. That part’s easy. But the other reason is the kick in the teeth. See, you know without a moment’s hesitation that this four-foot-nothing bitch has just defied the laws of physics by plastering you—the golden god of defensebutches everywhere, six feet and one hundred eighty pounds of lean muscle— into the boards with the inevitable, incalculable violence of a freight train splattering a mosquito.
Because you’re staring up into the fathomless black eyes of Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
“Why?” is all you can think to ask, like a fucking idiot. You’ll be regretting that one in the showers after.
“Because,” she says conversationally, barely audible over the bellowing crowd, “I completely fucking hate you. No offence.”
You lose 4-3. Nobody blames you. You kind of wish they would.
You’re turning it over in your head, forehead pressed against the shower tile, trying to remember what was in your peripheral vision just before the hit. A buck-naked Coronabeth whips you on the ass with a towel to try and snap you out of it. Even with your pretty strict “no fucking the teammates” rule, that would usually make your day, but you don’t even notice.
It’s like a magic trick, like Harrow was ten steps ahead of you. Ten steps ahead of everyone, honestly. You’ve already seen the replays; it doesn’t make physical sense that anyone that size could move that fast, but there it is. There you go, and there she goes, and BANG. Even the wide-angle camera up in the fucking rafters seems to shake with it.
You’d thought you were finally rid of her. Seriously. Like, you’re not a shut-in or a hermit or whatever—you knew Denver picked her up in the expansion draft, but you’d told yourself she’d still be watching from the press box six games in. She had to be too inexperienced. Too small. Too absolutely full of hatred, just a tiny nuclear furnace of pent-up rage that somehow hadn’t gone truly critical in all those godawful years you’d known her.
You slap off the water and stomp back into the locker room. Eventually you’re half-dressed, still lost in thought and concussion-clouded memories, when some of the chatter around you leaks through your fugue. Sure, she had two goals tonight, but she’s on eight already for the season. This wasn’t a special night for her. Apparently, the locker room in Denver tolerates her. She learned to actually pass the fucking puck at some point, to tone down the Infuriating Bitch Syndrome a notch or two.
And to hit like an asteroid.
Eventually, Coronabeth physically throws your tarp over your head to get you to start dressing again. “Gideon, stop moping. We’re going out, come on. J posted about a club—”
Ugh, that’s right. Coronabeth’s got a pretty one-sided thing for Deuteros, another Denver player, so she’s homing in on her, a heat-seeking missile with double-Ds and flawless lip gloss. You’d almost feel bad for Deuteros if she hadn’t slashed you twice.
No, scratch that, you still feel bad for her. You’ve been in the crosshairs before; you know what it’s like.
“Gutter!” Ianthe exclaims faux-cheerily as you slide into the backseat of the Uber and squash her against the better twin in the far seat. You try to bury your face in your phone, because it’s fucking Ianthe and you don’t need that smoke right now.
“You look positively harrowed,” she breathes, and laughs when your eye twitches. Laughs low and long until even CB elbows her to shut her up. Most nights you’d be able to tune your 2C out, but tonight, you realize, you don’t even want to. Better than the shit that’s going on in your head otherwise.
So you bitch and bicker at each other all the way to the club. By the time your fed-up Uber driver kicks you to the curb, Coronabeth is first out and practically jogging away from the car to ditch the pair of you. You were at least smart enough to shove Ianthe’s seatbelt connector down into the seam between the seats before you hop out, and it buys you time—enough time to ditch her screeching-harpy ass, nod to the disinterested bouncer, and lose yourself in the crowd and the thumping bass.
Tomorrow’s an afternoon practice, so more than two drinks would be a bad idea. That’s what you remember as you finish off your fourth whiskey soda, anyway. You’re chilling, avoiding teammates and opponents equally, parked at the bar. Then you look over and realize you’re sitting next to the ref who watched you get absolutely obliterated three hours ago.
“Hey, so,” you say, nudging his elbow, “that wasn’t actually dirty.”
“What?” he asks. He’s a grey little dude, wearing glasses now that he’s off the ice, but he’s got one of those faces you could just tell absolutely anything once you’re three drinks in. Three was a while ago.
“Your, uh, glasses—no, sorry. Even I won’t make that joke.”
He smirks. “You don’t look prepared to deliver it properly, anyhow.”
“Thaaaaat’s what’s she said.”
He ignores that completely. “Gideon Nav, right?” he asks, turning to look you over. “I wasn’t anticipating that hit any more than you apparently were, and I was facing the right direction to actually see it coming.”
“You’re really never beating the blindness allegations,” you tell him somberly.
You keep waiting for him to laugh and hop off his stool to go find someone else to talk to, but he doesn’t. He’s chill like that.
He’s telling you about his postdoc—words, just really complicated words, but he sounds pretty into it, and he’s been listening to you bullshit for a while, so fair’s fair. One of his fellow refs comes over to check on him, looks you over (visibly unimpressed behind her choppy black bangs), and replaces his hard soda with tap water. Dude doesn’t even notice, just gives her a distracted “thanks, Cam” as she pushes her way back to the dance floor.
You miss the point when it happens, but you eventually realize you’re telling him about Harrowhark.
I mean, it’s the logical segue, right? She rocked your shit and stood over you after. Everybody in the building—all eighteen thousand of you or whatever—knew something personal had just happened. But the ref (Palamedes, who is now just Pal because four syllables is a tall ask even when you’re stone cold sober) doesn’t even know the half of it, so… you tell him.
It was a foster home situation, you (ten) assigned with her (nine) and her shitty parents. Hate at first sight, and behavioral problems from the word “go”. Sent to the same boarding school to get rid of both of you. Inseparable like bucks with interlocked antlers, who can’t be pried apart until they starve to death in their shared misery.
There was a charity thing, a “learn to play” at the rink three blocks over with stank-ass donated gear, and suddenly both of you were skating every minute you could. Cutting class for it. Racing. Knocking each other down harder and harder until somebody sprained something. Getting kicked out of boarding school. Signing up for a no-name, dead-end peewee team to keep you out of trouble back home. Screaming and bitching each other out in the locker room from ages twelve to eighteen as your teammates watched in awed silence.
Then came scholarships to UConn—yes, both of you. Classic Harrow, swears up and down she would rather slit her wrists than look at your stupid fucking face one more time and then follows you to college a year later. Screaming and bitching each other out in the locker room from yes we’ve done this before, skip ahead, it doesn’t get better—
Then the PWHL.
Finally, finally, you’d thrown her off your trail. You got scouted and drafted and left her behind to tyrannize the UConn squad, fully unchecked, scoring at will and freezing out even the most sympathetic teammates with the worst case of resting bitch face (and never-resting bitchiness beneath) that New England writ large had ever seen.
I mean, you kept tabs just in case. You still had actual friends back at the U, and obviously they were going to mention the goth queen supreme of the rink and her reign of terror. Self-interest meant you had to be aware of her movements, in case she got any ideas about trying to follow you again. Obviously.
But you had made it. You were in the show.
And New York’s been good to you, right? It’s a sparse home crowd sometimes, especially on weeknights and when you’re still playing half your games in goddamn New Jersey, but they’re loud and proud and they make you feel like a fucking rockstar when you light the lamp. The locker room loves you. Besides Ianthe, but Ianthe doesn’t count; Ianthe doesn’t love anybody but herself and, by deeply fucked-up extension, Coronabeth.
Anyway. You let your guard down.
And then fucking Harrowhark Nonagesimus tried to put you through the glass.
“You really should wear your chinstrap tighter, Nav,” Palamedes puts in sagely. His glasses have slipped down his nose for the forty-seventh time. He hasn’t noticed yet.
“Thanks, mom,” you mutter into your tap water. Either you grew some common sense before you last shouted at the bartender, or Cam dropped you off some water too. No prizes for guessing which. “And yeah, it was a clean hit or whatever, but—”
“A clean hit can also be personal,” Palamedes observes.
“She’s such a fucking bitch. At least I only have to see her, what… four times a year?”
Palamedes considers that, staring waveringly into space past your left shoulder, frowning slightly. Then squinting.
The hair on the back of your neck lifts, and every old instinct fires. It’s like having ice water poured down your back. You know who you’re going to see when you turn around, so you delay, try to look really interested in your water.
“Nav.”
Fight or flight instinct. You might as well be completely sober. Okay, other than the very visible sway as you pivot on your barstool to look quite a ways down at Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
“The hagette herself!” You try to sound surprised, but this might be the least surprising thing to happen to you tonight. Inevitable. Tidally locked, mutually orbiting planets. Interlocked horns, or whatever.
“I expected you to be trying to put your hand up a skirt.”
“You sound disappointed,” you chide, affecting a casual lean back against the bar top and almost knocking your water over. “You making a request?” A little leer at the end to really get to her. The repressed little shit is such an easy target sometimes—too easy to screw with her, because literally why else would anyone ever hit on her? Stardom is wasted on this tiny gremlin.
Her eyebrows do that obnoxious pinch-together thing in the middle; there’s enough potential energy in the taut line of her shoulders to power the city for a year. “Nauseating as ever. I assume your plan is to spend your entire plane ride home vomiting up whatever you’ve been drinking?”
“Only if you talk to me long enough that I remember this conversation tomorrow.”
Palamedes is watching keenly, eyes flicking back and forth like he’s following a tennis match. That mental image produces the very satisfying thought of bouncing a tennis ball off Harrow’s stress-creased forehead over, and over, and over, and over, and—
Shit, she was saying something else. Probably pissy and irrelevant. “Yeah, whatever,” you sneer, and pivot away from her.
“I’m not done speaking with you, you intellectually stunted—”
“Says the physically stunted—”
“How did the boards taste?”
“About the same as my fist is about to.”
She goes for the hair pull first. Even if she weren’t four foot nothing, no team would ever let Harrowhark fight; she’s too valuable, but also just complete dogshit at it. So you shove her off, get your forearm clawed for your trouble, look for a chokehold and get elbowed hard in the solar plexus. Somewhere in there, a bouncer who’s even bigger than you has calmly interspersed himself and is telling you both politely, but firmly, to leave.
So you leave. People were staring anyway. She trails behind you, breathing hard with a little hitch to each gasp. And when you sit on the curb to wait for the Uber you’re still trying to remember how to summon, squinting at two blurring copies of your phone, she sits maybe a foot away.
“Still got that asthma thing?” you ask, trying to sound uninterested. You’re taking notes on how to properly kick her ass on the ice next time, you reassure yourself.
“Allergies,” she says tersely. “Denver decided to import some bluegrass or other when they wasted trillions of gallons of water turning a dry prairie into a dry prairie with a few golf courses. Its pollen also tries to kill me when I breathe.”
“Good tactic. Hey, do you know the exact scientific name of that grass? For research purposes.”
“Fuck off, Nav.”
“Trying, baby.”
She sneers and looks away. You didn’t give her a black eye or anything, but there’s definitely some bruising along her neck and jaw. Shit, the video of that little tilly is probably going to be all over socials tomorrow. Can’t wait to hear from fucking John about it.
Tomorrow’s problem. Your Uber pulls up, which is when you realize you’ve been watching her for eight minutes and she’s determinedly not been looking at you.
“Bye,” you say, sounding unbelievably lame.
“Goodbye,” she says distantly, and you almost fall into the Uber with the sheer fucking astonishment of it.
You don’t even make it thirty seconds before you’re looking up the schedule to see when you play Denver next.