life is a tough crowd

“Found you.”

“Don’t do this.”

Jack is covered in sweat and there’s a piece of confetti in his hair. He looks every bit the three-time Stanley Cup champion that he became an hour and 45 minutes ago. 

Kent is covered in sweat and there’s blood staining the sleeve of his jersey, which he still has not taken off. 

His knee hurts, there’s a bruise running up the entire left side of his body.

“I wanted to say good game.”

Kent is silent, staring at the floor, deliberately not looking at Jack’s shoes. 

“But you left the ice before the handshakes,” Jack says, “Not that I blame you, I’d want to get ice on that as soon as possible too,” he gestures at Kent’s wrist, limply held against his chest, “So, yeah. Good ga-”

“Don’t fucking do this,” Kent interrupts, voice raised to just below a shout. 

“What?”

“We don’t have to do this just because we’re old. We don’t have to make peace or be friends.”

“That’s not-”

Kent cuts him off again, standing up this time. He’s still shorter than Jack Zimmermann, but he’s always been able to look him in the eye.

 “You won. I lost. That’s how it fucking works. That’s how it’s worked this whole fucking time! Fuck!” 

There’s a box of tape on the floor, brown, cardboard, open, but mostly full. An equipment manager must have stashed it and forgot about it. Kent kicks it. It slides about three inches. Pathetic, so he kicks it again, and then again. Hard this time. It flies through the air and hits the wall, contents spilling on the ground as Kent and Jack watch. 

They both notice immediately, the specialty tape, rainbow colours, rolling across the floor. It’s an apt metaphor, one that neither of them acknowledges. 

Jack sighs. 

“You want a drink?” He asks. 

“You don’t drink?” Kent says. He’s really not sure these days – what Jack does and doesn’t do. 

“Not so much anymore,” Jack says, “But you do.”

Kent sighs, “I’ll get dressed. Give me 15.”

“Okay,” Jack says. 

Kent puts on his sweatpants, a hoodie, and a baseball cap. He doesn’t particularly feel like getting recognized with Jack Zimmermann tonight. Not that he thinks there are many Aces fans who’d want a picture after they got boo’d off the ice to end the first period.

Jack has taken his suit jacket off when Kent finds him hanging out in the hallway. He looks good, as much as Kent hates to still notice that. His dark hair has a few streaks of grey in them these days, just around the temple. It makes him look like a real grown up, in the way that Kent’s carefully maintained, but slowly receding hairline, has never been able to make Kent look. 

“Hotel bar?” Jack asks. 

Kent nods. 

It’ll be discreet, somewhere that regular people won’t be able to eavesdrop. 

They don’t talk. Kent drives. Jack’s teammates have piled into ubers, probably already on the strip, thousands of dollars deep into a bar tab. Kent doesn’t bother to ask why Jack isn’t with them. He’s weird in ways that haven’t been Kent’s business for years.

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Back in Juniors, there had been a running joke that Kent was married to his cellphone. Not that he was always on it, or glued to it, just that he always had it, like an extension of himself. His phone was recognizable from afar, bright red to match the car he was going to have someday. It was easy to tell what it meant when he was on it. He was planning parties, talking to people who wanted to talk to him more, talking to his agent.

He had other conversations from that phone, too, though. Calling Jack. Calling his parents. Calling Jack’s parents. That was where all the real talking happened.

He’d been doing a lot of that recently. Talking to his parents, talking to Jack’s parents, when all he really wanted to be doing was talking to Jack.

He wanted to talk to Jack, but he couldn’t. They wouldn’t let him. Jack didn’t get to have a cellphone in whatever asylum they’d put him in - and yeah, he knew he shouldn’t call it an asylum, he knew it wasn’t an asylum, but he kept picturing bars on windows and people walking around in hospital gowns and suddenly rehabilitation center and asylum and prison all sounded the same. He didn’t get to have a computer, either. That one pissed Kent off, because what did they think Jack was going to do? Find some drug dealer on eBay and decide to take up coke?

All it meant was that Kent wanted to hear from Jack, needed to hear from Jack, but couldn’t visit, call, text, or email. The only people who got to stay in touch with him at all right now were his parents.

So Kent spent a lot of time talking to Jack’s parents.

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sometimes i like to make myself sad by thinking about how kent thought he had a solid family structure with bob and alicia around and when jack cut him out, he lost all of it :)))

im his enemy . his arch nemesis. his wicked rabbit

Alive in a place it has no right to be | T | 5k

The picture was nothing special, just him, wearing shorts and laying down on the grass. It was summer, he would never forget that day. He had been content, he had wished for all his life to be like that. Jack was laying beside him, but in the picture he was forever out of frame. There was a hand on Kent’s thigh, just above the hickeys (Jack would call them lovebites).

You used to love me like that.

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i was like ‘im gonna do ONE kenny drawing and then put omgcp/hockey away’. and then did… over ten…

Playoffs

Notes: I’m cleaning out my WIP folder, we’ll see where it takes us.

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Alexei fancies himself a romantic—the sort of man who wines and dines his lovers before falling into bed with them.

Which is why the thing with Parson is such a disaster.

“My place?” Parson asks, after an accidental meeting in a Vegas bar and a thirty-minute conversation has Alexei still unsure whether Parson is flirting with him or trying to start a fight. They’ve got a game against each other tomorrow morning and Alexei already hates Parson’s guts. Sleeping with him is a terrible idea. But Alexei is coming down off a really bad breakup, one that he hadn’t seen coming, one that has left him so heartbroken and at a loss for the reason that he has caught himself getting short with his teammates when they so much as mention their significant others.

Alexei had thought she was the one. He’d expected to marry her. Clearly, they hadn’t been on the same page.

Parson is as far from a romantic encounter as Alexei will get. As Taylor Swift would say, he’s a nightmare dressed as a daydream.

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That one scene in Atlantis but make it hockey

#and here you see both sides of Kent Parson#a himbo but also an elite strategic mind#por que no los dos?

Jfldksjflksjfdklsf YES you get it! But also im so sorry to kent parson because that ‘play’ i drew on the board is 100% copied from the movie Miracle and then with added scribbles from me to make it more aesthetic. So sorry to parser if that’s the worst play ever, dont try this one at home kids \o/

reasonable villain enjoyers have it rough because on the one hand you have to deal with people who woobify your villain faves and sandpaper away their hard edges (and most interesting qualities) to make them soft uwu; on the other hand there’s the folks who think your villain fave is satan incarnate or act like it’s an actual moral offence to like a fictional character who does bad things