Chapter Text
Chad: Welcome back to 690 AM, Montreal's 24-hour sports information station, you’re listening to Chad and Dylan in the morning, and Dylan was just explaining to us why he wants Jack Zimmermann to lose.
Dylan: I did not say that! Going second in the NHL overall draft is not losing, look, going anywhere in the first round is an incredible honour. And I'm as excited about Jack Zimmermann as any other red-blooded Canadian! He is undeniably the most talented player of this class, if not his generation—
Chad: Whoa, whoa, whoa, I was with you and then you lost me.
Dylan: He’s leading in goals, he was MVP at the Memorial Cup, when he’s on the ice you just can’t take your eyes off him. He’s got that star quality.
Chad: He's great, he's great, but I think it’s hard to pick a “best”. He is just not the same player without Parson on his team. You can’t just analyze him as a player without taking into consideration that incredible dynamic the two of them have, and I think that’s success he would not reach alone. And whichever way you slice it, those two guys are not going to be playing together next year.
Dylan: I disagree, I think he has been proven as a player on his own. At the World Junior Championship, again, he was one of the standout players of the tournament, and he—
Chad: —Yeah, with a little gamesaving peptalk from his friend in the red, white, and blue, I don’t think that’s—
Dylan: —Players are allowed to have friends, you keep talking like that’s a weakness. Look. When you talk about draft order you need to ask yourself, what does each team need? It’s a question of player strengths and personalities. The Aces have first pick, and what they really need is someone smart, versatile, and fast. A real team player. For Las Vegas, Kent Parson is absolutely what the doctor ordered.
Chad: And what the Montreal Canadiens need is the second coming of Jesus.
Dylan: Look, some decisions are just so obvious here, and Jack Zimmermann in a Habs jersey is what this sport needs right now. You’ve got a team on a rebuild, looking for some strong players to form the lines around. And then let's talk legacy...
Chad: You're going there. You're really going there. You're putting an entire century of weight on one kid's shoulders?
Dylan: I'm right! You won't admit that I'm right. Montreal! Talk to me, back me up, prove me wrong. The NHL draft is in a week. Kent Parson and Jack Zimmermann. One of them goes first, and one of them goes to Montreal. Which should it be? Our phone lines are open.
_/ \_
Jack didn't want to sit with him. He was four seats away from Kent—Jack, Alicia, Bob, Kent's mom, Isabelle. He'd refused to take Kent's hand in the car. Kent felt sick. Some sadistic fuck designed this ceremony to be as tedious and suspenseful as possible. Couldn't they all sort it out among themselves beforehand and post a list on the door like everybody else?
"Kent," his mom said, and reached across Belle to pull his hand out of his mouth. "Don't bite your nails."
This was gonna be okay, right? Jack wasn't as close to snapping now. There'd been a bad week where he was getting used to some new med and biting everybody's heads off and Bob and Alicia said he "needed space" and Kent wanted to disappear into the walls of their house in Montreal, but he'd been less explosive lately. Except for the times when his explosiveness meant throwing himself into Kent's arms, burrowing against his chest, and letting Kent do everything he could to take that fear away... but that had only been the once. And now every time Kent looked over at him, he seemed calm, composed, hands folded in his lap.
Kent tried to fold his hands in his lap, but half a minute later, his thumbnail was in his mouth again. He tucked his hands under his arms and started drumming his foot up and down on the ground.
"Nervous, much?" Belle asked, and he started bugging her with his elbow until he saw himself on the big screen, and tried to sit properly.
Okay. Okay okay okay. Dudes. Suits. Stage. Black-and-white jersey. Kent looked down, gripped his knees. He was supposed to shake everybody's hands onstage and not throw up.
"The Las Vegas Aces," somebody said, "are pleased to select Rimouski centre Jack Zimmermann."
A few seconds later, Belle poked him and hissed, "Move."
Kent had to shift his body, get his knees out of the way, so Jack could sidle by. He tried to raise his hand, maybe for a high five or something as Jack went by, but Jack didn't catch it. He was already out of their row, trotting down the aisle and up to the stage.
He shook everybody's hands. He didn't throw up. He didn't smile either.
No, Kent thought, his foot drumming the floor again. No, oh no, no no no. I let him down. I didn't do it. I didn't, they didn't, it wasn't supposed to...
"Kenny," Belle hissed, jamming her elbow into him. "That's you."
His mom smiled at him when he stood up. Bob and Alicia smiled too. Down on that stage, impossibly far away, there was a Canadiens jersey with his name on it. They were waiting for him.
He forgot to shake the third guy's hand, but he did remember to smile.
_/ \_
Benjamin McAullister, Captain of the Las Vegas Aces, had three beautiful grey-and-white Husky dogs. The oldest two liked to go with his girlfriend Sam wherever she went, so they were out grocery shopping right now. The third had taken a liking to Jack, and was friendly to the rest of the guests. Millie kept Kent company while he packed, and twice had to be told “Drop it!” over an item of clothing she stole from out of his suitcase. When he finished and zipped his luggage shut she laid down, momentarily subdued, and then jumped back up again when he shoved himself off the bed and left the room. When she was certain enough that he was going to Jack’s, she bounded down the hallway and eeled through Jack’s door, and Kent found her prancing a circle in Jack’s coverlet when he came in.
“Hey, Kenny,” Jack said, from where he was sitting sideways on the bed, knees tucked up to his chest, laying a book aside. He automatically reached out to put a hand on Millie’s head as she settled into a ball next to him. “You packed?”
“Yeah,” Kent replied, and then let his tiredness and sadness go as Jack reached out, beckoning him onto the bed.
They curled into each other, lying side by side with the dog at their feet. Both of them had tension that simmered in their bones; sometimes it was hard not to shake apart with it. Kent buried his head in Jack’s shoulder and felt Jack’s hand cupping his head. This was it. This was the absolute last moment until December.
“Jack,” he said tentatively, into his chest. “I’m… sorry for the way the draft went. I took your spot.”
Jack kept holding him, even as Millie uncurled from her ball and crept up Jack’s back, popping her head over to wash Kent’s face. “It’s not your fault I went first,” he said. “And, Kenny? I don’t really mind.”
Kent waved Millie off, pulling back to look at Jack. “You what?”
Jack looked a bit embarrassed as he propped himself up on an elbow to look back at Millie. He had to point and give her the command a few times before she crept back down the bed, and then he had to praise and reward her. “Going to Montreal,” he said finally. “It would’ve been. A lot of pressure, you know?” He shrugged. “I’m kind of glad.”
Kent took a minute to gape at him. I’m kind of glad. That turned everything he thought he knew about this summer upside-down, but after the first moment when he thought, Jack is just trying to make me feel better, it made everything make sense. Jack wasn’t tight and closed off and nervy about the draft because he was in competition with Kent; he was like that because he had been scared.
“I thought you were mad at me,” Kent blurted out.
Jack shook his head, and Kent shivered under the intensity of Jack’s seriousness. Jack kissed him, squeezing his wrist. “I know you’re gonna be great,” he said. “You’re where you should be.”
Kent let out a little choked noise that he thought actually wanted to be a laugh. “Then if you’re happy here,” he said, “I’m happy.”
They were kissing again when Bob called from the kitchen, “Kent? You ready to go?”
So then Kent had to get up, straighten his shirt, smooth down his hair, get his suitcase and walk to the kitchen like everything was all right. He hugged Jack goodbye and said, "See you at Christmas." Bob and Alicia hugged Jack goodbye and said, "See you at Thanksgiving." Millie licked their hands for the last time. And then they left and Jack locked the apartment door after them.
Kent's hands were shaking as they waited for the elevator. He shoved them in his pockets.
If you travelled first class, you didn't have to sit in the huge airport boarding lounge with a million other people. There was a discreet little door to a nice lounge where they checked your boarding pass and offered you a water bottle and gestured you to a table of snacks and a wet bar. It was the kind of thing the Zimmermanns were used to, and Kent supposed this was going to be his new reality too now. The lounge was almost empty, hushed, the lighting nice and dim, the surfaces plush carpet and polished wood. Kent trailed Bob and Alicia, wondering as he sat down whether he ought to give them some time alone. There had to be a point, in the year ahead, where he stopped clinging to their apron strings, didn't there? They'd want him to move out eventually. But they were still some of the only things standing between him and screaming terror, so whether or not he was a burden to them, he was going to coast in their wake a little longer.
"I liked his new therapist," Alicia said, paging through a copy of Maclean's. Kent looked up, wondering again if he was supposed to be listening to this, but they seemed relaxed about it.
"I know Jack's still nervous about her," Bob said, eating out of Alicia's little bag of pretzels. "But I think we've learned our lesson about leaving him to rely on team psychologists. It's worth giving him a resource who isn't on Aces payroll."
"What'd you think, Kenny?" Alicia asked mildly, moving her pretzel bag out of reach.
Kent hesitated. Jack's new therapist had invited him to one of the sessions as "someone significant to Jack", but he didn't know if she thought it was anything more than that. He'd spent a lot of the session nervous himself, wondering what she saw when she looked at him. He swallowed. "Jack's, uh. Worried that the new medication is going to affect his performance."
"Well," Bob said, "he doesn't act like he has eyes in the back of his head anymore, and I can see how that'd feel like a downside in hockey, but... for one, he's a lot less likely to get addicted to it."
They reminded Kent of dealing with other players as Jack's A, saying It's a bad day today, don't bother him. Jack actively hated having people talk about his moods, but the fact was, if you lived with them you kind of had to, because the alternative was never knowing if you were walking into a hurricane or sunny skies, depending on the day.
"He seems calmer all around now, don't you think?" Alicia offered Kent the pretzel bag, angling her arm to keep it away from Bob, who opened his own.
Kent took a pretzel, frowning. Yeah, Jack seemed better now that he was in Las Vegas, but how was he supposed to know what that meant? It wasn't playoffs, wasn't waiting for the draft, so maybe he just wasn't as stressed. Kent shouldn't have gone back to New York at the end of July. Who knew what else was hiding under there? He didn't like the idea of a medication that you had to take every day, not just when you needed it. He didn't know what he'd turn Jack into. And yet...
Kent offered, "He said today that he was a little bit glad that he didn't go to Montreal."
"No wonder," Bob sighed. "June was not a month I want to live through again."
"Amen, brother," Alicia muttered. She sighed. "It's gonna be a hell of a lot easier to keep tabs on him now I'm not filming 26 episodes a year."
Kent opened his water bottle, since he didn't want to comment on how he remembered June. For him it was kind of as bad as it'd always been, but also amazingly wonderful; if the lows had been necessary, he'd go through them all again for the highs.
_/ \_
"Okay," Ben said. "So you give her the cue and the hand signal once, and then you wait. If she responds, then you click and reward."
Ben's dogs were incredibly well-trained. Three times a week, his girlfriend took them to an air-conditioned indoor dog park and did agility courses with them. Rosie, the oldest, obeyed commands to fetch beer from the fridge. Ben said it was because huskies were so intelligent, and if Jack wanted to learn, he could be part of Millie's training.
"Got it," Jack said, and went to kneel in front of her, the clicker in his hand and kibble in his pocket. "Shake," he said, holding his hand out. Millie pawed at the air.
"Good girl," Ben said, and clicked with his tongue. "Reward her, Jack."
"But she didn't do it," Jack objected.
"Here." Ben fished a treat out of his own pocket and threw it for Millie to pluck out of the air, then leaned down to scratch Millie's ruff when she came up to him. "She made a gesture at it. You can't just expect her to perfectly remember what we did a week ago. You reward for partial effort, and slowly she learns what it is you want out of her."
Jack sat back on his heels. "What keeps her from slacking off and only doing the bare minimum?"
"Zimmermann." Ben reached over and shook Jack's shoulder slightly; Jack flinched back. "You're one hard fucking taskmaster, buddy. Look, these dogs like to work. They wanna learn cool interesting new stuff, and they will go above and beyond for you. Don't worry about that. The most important thing here is that we're building her trust. She's gotta trust that as a handler, you're gonna be consistent and predictable. If she's doing good, you'll tell her that she does good. You won't ask her to do something and then be totally impossible to please. The worst thing that could happen today is that she gets frustrated and decides that it's impossible, and she doesn't want to work with you anymore."
Jack swallowed, and held his hands out to Millie so she'd come back to him. She did; he buried his hands in her fur, and she licked his face, then came to lean against him. He wanted to be like Sam, to have a dog going over obstacles and around courses. He wanted Millie to keep sleeping on his bed at night. He didn't want her to stop trusting him.
"Okay," he said. "I'll try again. I'll reward her this time."
_/ \_
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Hey Zimms
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Hey Pete
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Congrats on the Mem win
I wanted to say so that night but i couldn't find you in the crowd ;)
Hope LV is treating you good
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thanks
how are you?
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not bad, not bad
this year I declared my major in Business
I'm one of the managers for our Div I team, figure I'll take after my dad XD
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cool
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been wondering something lately
do you, or your dad, know anyone who's worked in professional hockey who's gay?
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cause I talked to my dad and he said he couldn't say if he knew anyone. not sure if "couldn't say" means he doesn't know anyone or doesn't want to tell. but it's like... I don't think there's been NOBODY, right? except idk, if you've won the Stanley Cup don't you think you'd say "fuck it"?
this year at college I met a guy who was a pretty good player but he decided to stop playing in high school bc he knew he was gay and didn't think he could hide it
I keep thinking about it
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idk anyone
sorry
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oh, too bad :(
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let me know if you find anyone
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sure thing buddy :)