Chapter Text
For the longest time, Kent thought what happened to him before the Q was normal.
He’d known since elementary school that being gay was something you had to keep secret, but he also knew there was something inherently grown up about it, even for kids; or at least, that’s what he took away from being told he was “too young to know about that sort of thing” the one time he’d asked his teacher what gay people were like. He’d nodded dutifully at her rebuke, resisting the urge to ask, “But what if I am that sort of thing?”, because it clearly wouldn’t get him anywhere good. Afterwards, though, he’d reached a quiet accord with himself: Kent was competitive, always looking for ways to think of himself as better, to make himself better, and if being gay was something young people couldn’t know about, then knowing he was gay must mean he was somehow older than his age.
So when his next door neighbour singled him out for praise and attention, murmuring that he knew how difficult it was to grow up like that, and what a difference it made to have someone knowledgeable to help and teach you early on – how some things just had to be secret between men like them, and Kent wouldn’t go and tell anyone, would he? – it all made perfect sense. Kent was gay, which had to be secret anyway, and being gay meant he was more grown up than everyone but Gary thought, and he wasn’t old enough yet for checking to be a part of hockey, but he still knew all about how to push off and skate through if something hurt, and it did hurt, sometimes, but you couldn’t say no to a lesson –
The point is, he thought it was normal, and when Jack Zimmerman shyly confessed that Kent was his first everything, he’d blushed and said, “The same for me, too,” because Gary had told him that was what you were meant to say with someone else. Which – did that mean Jack was lying, too? The idea that someone had done to Jack what Gary had done with Kent made his stomach twist; he found himself pretending that he was Jack’s first, that Jack was his, and even though it was so, so good, he ended up shaking afterwards without understanding why. More than once, Kent almost brought it up with Jack, but always changed his mind at the last minute; it would’ve felt like breaking the unwritten rule of pretending they had nothing to discuss besides hockey, like what they were really doing together and whether they’d still be doing it after the draft, and how Kent was drinking way too much and Jack was taking too many pills and neither of them was really fine, no matter how often or firmly they said they were.
Push off, skate through. Kent knew how to do that by then. He thought Jack did, too.
Jack didn’t.
*
Three days after Kent found Jack convulsing on the bathroom floor, he signed with the Las Vegas Aces. Two days after that, he was gone from the Q forever, assigned to live with one of the Aces veterans until he either bonded enough with one of the other rookies to consider rooming with them or found his feet sufficiently to fly solo. Katzy is solid on the ice and solid off it, quiet in a way that steadies rather than unsettles, and for the first two weeks of their cohabitation, Kent figures that if Katzy hasn’t noticed anything wrong with him, then there mustn’t be anything wrong to notice, nightmares or no nightmares. Jack is alive and far away, and Kent is fine. He is.
And then, at the end of week three, Katzy sits him down and says, with characteristic gruffness, “Parser, you’re a dream on the ice, but you scream in your sleep two nights in three, and that can’t be good for you. I hadn’t mentioned it before because, well, what happened with Zimmerman would be enough to mess anyone up a little, and there’s no shame in takin’ time to recover, but. It’s okay to ask for help, you know?”
Kent just stares at him, cheeks red with mortification and unable, for once in his life, to come up with a snappy comeback. Katzy’s face, which mostly looks like moustachioed sandstone, softens a little.
“Oh, kid,” he says. “You didn’t know I could hear you?”
Kent shakes his head; he hadn’t even realised he was making noise at all. “Sorry,” he says. “Fuck. I’ll, uh. I’ll try and figure it out. Look some stuff up, or whatever. Talk to someone.” He has no intention of doing the last, but Katzy doesn’t need to know that; it’s what you’re meant to say.
“Good,” says Katzy, clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s – that’s real good, Parser. And if you want to talk to me, you can. I’ve got your back, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” says Kent, because you’re meant to say that, too. “Thanks, Katzy.”
Which is how, three hours later, he finds himself in bed with his laptop, Googling for stupid shit like stopping nightmares and how to cope friend’s overdose until he lands on an article on survivor’s guilt that links to another on PTSD, which leads in turn to a bullet-point list of its common causes in kids and adolescents. The very first entry, also linked, is on childhood sexual abuse, which doesn’t apply at all to Kent freaking out about Jack’s overdose, but he somehow clicks it anyway, pulse spiking oddly as the new page flashes up.
Kent reads, and his throat goes dry.
It’s wrong, is the thing. It has to be wrong, but he can’t quite pull his eyes away, and when another link comes up, he clicks that, too, and the one after that, and the one after that, and by the time he realises he’s hyperventilating, it’s too late to pretend that none of it applies to him. He shoves his computer aside, lurches off the bed and stumbles into the bathroom just in time to throw up in the toilet, tears in his eyes as his nostrils sting and his whole world rearranges itself. Not only has he failed to find a way to deal with Jack, he’s somehow gone and made things even worse than they already were; or maybe it’s always been this bad, and he’s only now figured it out. The thought leaves him choked with awful laughter, stomach spasming violently as he tries and fails to not throw up again.
At some point, Katzy comes in and crouches beside him, rubbing Kent’s back and murmuring reassurances. It’s soothing, but it also makes a part of Kent want to laugh harder: Katzy has years of practice looking after sickdrunk rookies, but Kent isn’t drunk and he’s not even messed up now for the reason Katzy thinks, and how the fuck is he meant to deal with this?
“I’m fucked up,” he gasps, “Katzy, I fucked up, I’m so fucked up, I fucking – I should’ve fucking known, I should’ve –”
“It’s not your fault, Parser,” Katzy says, but Kent shakes his head, because Katzy doesn’t know what Kent did, and how could he not have realised? Kent knows what a fucking paedophile is, he just – he thought there was a difference, it’s not like Gary was some random guy who snatched him from a park or whatever, he was nice, he listened to Kent and told him it was normal to feel the way he did, except that it wasn’t normal and Kent isn’t normal and oh, fuck, what if that means he hurt Jack when they were together? What if everything Gary taught him was wrong and Kent hurt Jack and Jack didn’t know any better because Kent didn’t know any better and Kent’s the reason Jack nearly died from an overdose instead of going first in draft, and what if, what if –
Much later, when he’s calmed down enough to finally drink some water, breathe and reassure a weary-looking Katzy that he just needed to “get some shit out of my system, really, I’m fine for morning skate, I swear you don’t need to call anyone,” Kent crawls back into bed and shakily reclaims his laptop. In a new tab, he Googles ways to deal with PTSD no meds no psych and reads up about breathing techniques and meditation, which, okay, he can try and do that, though it doesn’t really seem like much. Then he finds an article on therapy animals, which turns out to basically mean pets that help you to not freak out, even if they aren’t specially trained, and Kent –
Kent’s always wanted a cat.
He sells the idea to Katzy over breakfast the next morning, carefully keeping his gaze on his scrambled eggs.
“It’s meant to be good for you,” he says. “Being responsible for an animal, you know. Gives you something to focus on outside your head, something to look after. Like having a rookie, but furrier.” He flashes a quick look at Katzy, relieved when he laughs at the joke.
“Sure thing, Parser,” Katzy says. “A cat sounds fine. Just don’t name it after me.”
Kent snorts. “Katzy the cat? Really?”
“Hockey players aren’t exactly known for bein’ original.” He pauses, taking a swallow of coffee. “You wanna get something pedigree, look up breeds?”
“No,” says Kent, relieved that Katzy’s on board with this. “There’s, uh. There’s a shelter nearby, and I figured I’d go there after practice, you know. See what they’ve got in stock.”
“Sure,” says Katzy. “Just gimme a call if you’re actually bringing someone home so I know to close the windows.”
“Sure,” says Kent, and wonders at the sudden lump in his throat.
*
There’s so many cats at the shelter, Kent honestly feels overwhelmed. The woman on duty, Anna, seems to understand: she gives him a quiet place to sit and a single kitten to focus on, a splotched black-and-white from a mongrel litter who climbs determinedly up Kent’s shoulder, needle claws pricking even through his hoodie. The kitten is energetic and wonderful, but so tiny that it freaks Kent out: he wants a cat to comfort him, not one so young that he’s going to worry about fucking up its development or whatever, and he’s on the brink of saying as much when a blocky guy with a beat-up cardboard box in his arms starts kicking the glass front door.
“Little help?” he calls, and Anna moves to let him in, standing aside as the guy heaves a sigh of relief. “Sorry I didn’t call ahead,” he says, “I just – I wasn’t even sure she’d make it here.”
Anna peeks into the cardboard box and blanches. “Is she yours?”
“Fuck no,” the man says, a growl in his voice. “She’s a stray. I’ve seen her around the bar before, but never got close enough for a grab before now. Some asshole was fucking hurting her, and I called the cops on him for that, but – well.” He grimaces at the box. “I wasn’t quick enough.”
Kent stands without quite meaning to. Dislodging the kitten from its shoulder-perch, he sets it down with its littermates and wanders over. “Can I –?” he starts, but the sentence dies when he sees what Anna and Bar Guy are seeing, cold fury choking him silent.
The cat is maybe eight months old, long and lanky enough to be visibly outgrowing kittenhood while still not yet adult. Her long fur is matted in awful hard clumps, dirt-grey and blood-streaked; there’s a thin cut running along her side, and her left hind leg is broken so badly it makes Kent want to be sick. Her notched ears are laid back and she’s panting in pain, but when Kent makes a noise of shock, she opens her eyes to look at him, hissing weakly.
Her eyes are pale blue, clear and beautiful. They remind him a little of Jack’s.
Kent swallows hard and makes himself look at Anna. “Can you save her?”
Anna winces. “We can certainly try, but she’s going to need surgery, which isn’t cheap, and right now, the shelter – well. We do what we can, but we run on donations, and a case like this –”
“I have money,” Kent blurts, cutting her off. “I’ll pay for whatever she needs, I’ll donate to the shelter, just – Jesus, can you just help her? Please?”
“The surgery might cost thousands, Kent,” says Anna, gently. “Your parents –”
“I’m eighteen,” Kent snaps. “The money’s mine, and I’m – I have a lot of it, okay? Please.”
“Shit,” says Bar Guy, blinking at Kent in sudden shock. “You’re Kent Parson. The new Aces rookie, right?”
It’s the first time Kent’s been recognised since he joined the NHL, and something about the absurdity of it happening here, of all places, makes him laugh.
“Yeah,” he says, slightly manic. “That’s me.”
Bar Guy looks pointedly at Anna. “Trust me, he’s good for it.”
“I’ll call the vet,” says Anna.
*
In the end, Kent pays three grand out of pocket for the cat’s surgery – her leg is so badly broken that the vet decides to amputate, never mind the costs of getting her sewn up, desexed, vaccinated and microchipped – and donates another ten grand to the shelter out of sheer gratitude. He takes his new cat home two days later, by which time she has three legs, a mostly shaved coat, a scarred flank, more cat paraphernalia than is strictly necessary and a prickly attitude, hissing displeasure as Kent lets her out of the brand new, sky-blue carrier and into Katzy’s house.
“You sure about this?” asks Katzy, raising a brow as his newest housemate scuttles under the couch.
“Yeah,” says Kent, grinning stupidly. “I really am.”
“You got a name picked out?”
Kent tells him. Katzy laughs.
“In my defence,” says Kent, “you only said not to name her after you.”
The Aces chirp Kent mercilessly for having a three-legged cat called Kit Purrson, which is what he was banking on: they’re so hung up on the funny name and what it ostensibly says about Kent’s ego that none of them really question him getting a cat in the first place. He knows that Katzy is keeping a sharp eye on his moods, so Kent goes out of his way to try and socialise with the other rookies, even at times when he’d rather just go home. But Kit, it turns out, is the perfect excuse to bail early when he hits his limit: no matter how often he says “my cats are missing me” – meaning Kit and Katzy, because that particular pun hardly went unnoticed – it always elicits a favourable ratio of laughter to grumbling from his teammates, which lets him get away from them largely unchallenged. At home, he tries to meditate, do breathing exercises like the internet said, but he’s never been good at clearing his mind with anything other than alcohol, and in the end, it’s easier to medicate quietly: a shot of straight vodka just before bed from the bottle Katzy hopefully doesn’t know about. Or more than one shot, sometimes. Just to take the edge off.
The first time Kent wakes up with Kit on his chest, he doesn’t know what’s happening. He gasps into consciousness at 3am, one arm flailing for the bedside light, and finds himself staring into pale blue eyes.
“Kit?” Kent whispers. He’s had her barely a week, and so far he can count on one hand the number of times she’s voluntarily sought out physical contact. He’s been giving her space the way Anna suggested, letting her sniff his fingers and rub her face on his things, lying down flat where she can see him, making himself look small. Most of her fur was shaved off during surgery – aside from all the clumps, they needed to check her for injuries – but it’s growing back soft and white. She’s still so thin in makes his heart hurt, her weight on his chest almost negligible, but when she starts to purr, he feels the gentle vibration in his bones.
Tentatively, Kent lifts a hand and pets between her ears. Kit twists her head and licks the side of his hand with her pink, rough tongue. She purrs and purrs, and Kent cries quietly without knowing why, and when he finally falls asleep again, he doesn’t dream.
A week later, Katzy watches Kit wolf into her tin of gourmet wet food and says, without quite looking at Kent, “You seem to be sleepin’ better.”
“Yeah,” says Kent, and manages a shaky laugh. “I guess I am.”