First week of freshman year jack tells a junior named bitty “you should eat more protein” and bitty thinks, “To Hell With This Kid,” conveniently ignoring that he and jack are the same age. Bitty then concludes that it is jacks personal mission to make him miserable for some reason and theres an awkward one-sided feud because jack, despite thinking that bitty SHOULD EAT MORE PROTEIN, admires how fast bitty can go and thinks hes a great captain but also lies on shitty’s lap a few nights and is like “why does he hate me :(“ and shitty is just kind of like “???? Bro he thinks that YOU hate HIM” and jack is just like “???? But i told him he has soft hands and that i like his jacket”—which coincidentally is an obnoxiously gay jacket but thats neither here not there—“why arent we friends yet” and shitty is just sitting there like “uhhhhh” because the other night bitty got drunk in shitty’s room and loudly complained about how the new teammate made fun of his jacket and hes pretty sure that jack is homophobic
And anyway bitty kind of resents jack bc he thinks jack got everything handed to him (rich boy with daddy’s money, yeah yeah yeah), and also because bitty is still somehow completely oblivious to hockey news despite having played it for two years. Ransom and holster make jokes abt bad bob and bitty is like “who?” And everyone thinks he’s joking except for jack who thinks bitty is patronizing him
Meanwhile other upperclassmen are picking on jack because he’s older and he overdosed and yet he is SO VERY GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES and they fucking HATE that. They make jokes about crack and try to pressure jack into drinking even tho he’s clearly uncomfortable and there’s a lot of passive aggressive comments that jack never really knows how to respond to so he just doesnt
THE WORST PART. THE WORST PART is that jack is starting to like bitty and there’s so much panic in his chest about it because he is still raw from everything that happened with Kent and also bitty thinks he’s homophobic still so every time jack awkwardly tries to flirt bitty thinks he’s making fun. And then parse visits and all the ugly, anxious parts of jack that he has been trying to shove away and forget emerge and bitty finds him in the hallway in the middle of a panic attack, unable to get up and leave, and bitty realizes, oh. Jack isn’t homophobic; he’s just so so so repressed and scared and he thinks the overdose is all his fault
If you say something to someone enough, sometimes they start to believe it’s true and that’s what everyone says to jack. It’s what he says to himself. And bitty realizes, hey, he and jack arent that different—theyre just different flavors of fucked up
And he starts to notice the little ways jack shows affection to people, how shitty is one of the only people he’s comfortable around and how one time when bitty ran out of butter jack drove to the store and came back, almost shyly giving it to bitty like he thinks bitty will turn it away
And jack is prickly and tight and anxious and mean but bitty can give just as good as he can take and sometimes they lie next to each other on the lawn and come up with pithy things to say about their teammates and each other and jack is always like “don’t you DARE tweet that” and bitty is like “too late. It’s tweeted.” And bitty finds out that jack doesnt have a nickname not because he didnt want one but because the other upperclassmen wouldnt give him one and he casually sharpens his knives and possibly checks one teammate a little bit too hard during practice and he calls jack “honey” and “sweetpea” and “sugar” except without the usual passive aggressive southern bite and jack decides that he doesnt mind that bitty is the only one who does and purposely doesnt think about the fond note in bitty’s voice when he calls him those things
One night while studying french because bitty is still absolutely hopeless at it, bitty’s hand finds jack’s and they somehow SOMEHOW end up curled up around each other because really, who needs to learn french anyway? Nothing is the same. Everything is the same. They’re jack and bitty—it doesn’t matter the universe; they always, always find each other
dededos
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
stormborns
