Wait I’m sorry parent/child incest fic?????? Why does that exist? Why do you KNOW that exists?????? What the fuck 🤢
I feel like you can sort of tell how long (or not) someone has existed in fannish spaces by how outraged they get about things like this. Like rings in a tree trunk lol. I've been in so many fandoms. At least one, but often multiple at the same time, since I was a teenager. I've seen just. Everything.
Sex pollen. Mpreg. Incest. Monster fucking. Tentacles. Pairings like Snape/Hermione that would be crazy abusive and illegal if they were real. Wild kinks. The babygirlification of all kinds of villains. So much RPF (the 'I sincerely believe they are secretly a couple' kind and the 'this is fictional but it's fun to imagine they're in love' kind.)
You learn to just scroll past shit you don't like or unfollow people or filter tags. The tldr of fandom is that humans are weird as fuck. And creative, and unhinged, and traumatized, and talented. And amazing. And every single thing that you clutch your pearls about 'well surely someone doesn't want to read/write THAT!' - someone does. Probably lots of people do. And those people are perfectly normal. In their offline lives, they're parents and siblings and they have jobs and friends and they go about their lives and they don't cause any harm. And that's the sticking point. There's this really concerning, frankly highly Evangelical idea that if someone enjoys the wrong kind of fiction, they are obviously a Bad Person. But nothing is that simple, and thought crimes aren't real, and you definitely have some thoughts or ideas that someone else would find fucked up. You don't have to like every kind of fic that exists. I certainly don't. But shaming people for their harmless fantasies about fictional characters is so boring. I saw Goody Proctor enjoying a Toxic Ship! Good for you, I'll alert the pope.
top 5 trevor being so earnest it kinda hurts to watch?
once again can't stick to 5, sorry, trevor looooves to just bleed out in full view of everyone
when he was beaten down on the ducks and gave that harrowing interview after being benched that he deserved 'every single second' and how he gets pretty emotional and doesn't handle things well, and it's a habit he's had 'for a long time' but he's trying to get better.
when he said jamie's trade was more painful than his broken ankle. straight up.
everything to do with shoulder check, esp saying it's an honour to check in with your friends
the post philly trade gondola pic. he really posted that in front of god and everyone huh
when he was interviewed post philly trade about jamie and his hand shook as he answered and he said 'jamie doesn't show much emeotion' like this is something he's struggled with before....wow i think we should all find very tall somethings
when he talked about learning piano after his injury. peak depression era.
every time he says something that alludes to wanting to be known for more than just being a flashy player
'that's about how quick the phone call was' after his celly. tried for bitchy, came off as deeply owch.
the greg cronin post-firing phone call saga. why are you expending your energy on that, babe. babe, put down the phone. babe!!!
when he posted that series of faceless photos of himself back in last april in his 11 jersey to his insta story bc he was going thru it and trying to Prove He Was Still Important And Good And Well Adjusted and Fine
jimmy's favourite hat gate. straight up refusing to pick up on the cues from the interviewers that this is Not What You're Supposed To Say. doubling down, even
jamie playoff insta story. like ok yeah we know you're Also Thinking About The Narrative, god!!!!
back in january when he knelt down on the ice to try and check if jamie was okay after he went down. climbed over the boards to get to him and everything.
when he said he didn't 'really have anyone to talk to' after his west coast games because of late timings for his family. oh trevor....
'told jimmy i was gonna do it' after his michigan. sure. ok.
palm trees and the moon sunset as his phone lock screen.... when you can never go back to a place and you wouldn't want to anyway, but you still miss it....
related 'i've been thinking about this game for a long time' before the anaheim match up at honda after saying earlier it wasn't a big deal. can't play it cool.
patting the flyers badge after the playoff exit....
when he said jamie's steak was good in that vid but then later admitted it was not, in fact, good. he just can't help himself.
i'm going to just blanket include the emotional support pink beanie. he needed some colour in his life!!!
no. 1 will always be the fact that he used to float in hampus' unheated pool as a way to decompress after games
the fact that the ducks deemed it important to force him to live with hampus as emotional support and it backfired when they traded hampus anyway and only ended up with jamie and trevor becoming even more codependant
he was so intent on not making a fuss about his contract talks with the ducks that this was reported on by hockey insiders, who were also reporting that they thought he was actively being intentionally shafted by verbeek.
that time where jamie essentially told an interviewer he considers trevor to be one of the best players in the world
tried learning the guitar when he was on IR, apprently only got as far as learning one song, brett young's 'in case you didn't know' which he apparently only ever played to trevor, on their rooftop. if you value your health and don't already know those lyrics, don't look them up. don't picture this scenario. just don't.
scared of the ocean! didn't go on the boat on the ducks cabo trip, presumably for this reason.
has, up until recently, spent his offseasons in a garage somewhere in ontario with his hometown boys
jamie's ducks teammates saying they have to text trevor to check in on jamie bc jamie seems to regularly throw his phone into the ocean
tried to get into drinking red wine when he injured his shoulder and was cooking steak for trevor
spent his 21st with the ducks wags getting iced
trevor (allegedly) taught him to play golf but definitely did buy him a set of clubs
went to catholic private school. related: his st christopher pendant
saw a post letting people know that your ao3 bookmarks are viewable on your account unless you make them private, which suggests that the median ao3 user does not use ao3 in what i will call 'the optimum fic-finding treadmill' where you find a fic author you like and look through their bookmarks to find more fics that are good and then look through that author's bookmarks for even more good fics. like a conga line of great but extremely specific tastes. or one of those chessboard rice doubling analogies and oh no that is a LOT of ao3 tabs.
Ashlyn: Are you surprised at all how much the city has falleni n love with [Trevor]?
Jamie: No. It took all of probably…within twenty minutes of meeting him, for every single guy in our organization to know what he’s about and to like him and appreciate him. I think he brings an energy into the rink that is kinda undeniable and fun to be around, and keeps things light. What you see on camera is exactly what he’s like behind closed doors. Great guy. Been playing great for us. Really lucky to have him.
Ashlyn: You are the group that’s gonna take this team to the next level.
Jamie: Yeah, and now we’ve got little Barkey buzzing around
re: prompts it’s been on my mind that no one seems to write about Jamie visiting Trevor in New York after the trade???
somehow this is 2.6k ?
"So.... this is where the magic happened," Trevor says, voice exaggeratedly deadpan as he pushes open the door to a bright, airy room. Trevor waits for Jamie to step inside first, following behind him. Jamie hadn’t asked for this tour, hadn’t really said much since neatly lining up his sneakers next to the shoe rack in the Zegras’s hall, spilling over with Trevor’s mom’s orthopaedic flip flops, his sister’s sandals, and Griffin’s deck shoes. It’s a nice house – big and airy and suburban, full of white panelling and tastefully neutral furnishings – but this room, like the rest of the house, like the shoe rack in the hall, shows unexpectedly few traces of Trevor.
Trevor sniffs, nose wrinkling, hands in his pockets, as Jamie turns in a circle to observe everything. “Yeah,” he laughs, dry, “they got rid of my bed a few years back. I swear I told you that?”
Jamie remembers, early Anaheim era, but he’d assumed it was in the way parents took the opportunity, once their kids moved out, to turn their bedroom into a guest room or office, fuss around with paint colours and curtain patterns again.
“With a couch?” he asks, as if he’s not looking at the L-shaped cream linen couch right in front of him, pushed up against the duck egg blue walls. There’s a small dip on one end, perfectly circular.
“Louie likes to sleep in here,” Trevor says, gesturing toward the divot. “And my mom uses it for overflow stock from the store sometimes, I think.”
It’s not a home office or anything. On the walls, there are a few shelves with dinky childhood trophies, gaps where they’ve been moved around or taken away. There are a ton of framed photos on the wall too, arranged around furniture that’s no longer there, all of Trevor in various hockey jerseys; a gangly blonde kid, narrow-faced, pink tongue clamped between his teeth mid-shot, or pressed up in a line with his teammates, grinning wonkily. There are hooks and darker squares on the wall where more stuff obviously used to hang. Jamie doesn’t know if those were photos of Trevor too, or maybe Trevor’s generic childhood sports memorabilia. There’s a lacrosse stick leaning up in the corner behind the couch, gathering dust, and a bracket on the wall above it – like it was too much effort actually to move it out of the room.
Now that they’re here, Trevor’s scratching at the back of his neck, tugging at the collar of his Prentiss shirt, like he’s no longer sure why he’s brought Jamie inside. Maybe to the house in general. The charity tournament is in two days, and Jamie has a neat, serviceable hotel room in Stamford, along with a bunch of other guys, mostly all there on Trevor’s invite. He and Trevor have spent the last few days in the gym together, moving through sets on opposite mats, catching sight of each other around moving, sweating bodies, eye contact that splinters after a couple of seconds too long. Trevor has a place he rents by the golf course, but Jamie hasn’t seen it, other than in the background of a few lightly strained facetime calls before he agreed to come down and play. There’s no reason for him to be here, out in New York, in the home Trevor sort-of-but-sort-of-didn’t grow up in.
Except that Trevor had asked.
He’d caught Jamie in the Prentiss parking lot, before Jamie’s Uber had arrived to take him back to the hotel, room service plans with Mason vaguely drawn up. Jamie hadn’t expected Trevor to be alone, gym bag slung over his shoulder, emerging out of the glass doors with his sunglasses pushed up into his sweat-damp hair. It had been hard to talk to him alone since arriving, actually, which was to be expected with all the other guys around, and also sort of relieving. Every time Jamie tried to think of what he’d say, if he got Trevor alone — if and how he wanted to apologize – he ended up squeezing his eyes shut and forcing himself to think about something else. None of his words ever seemed like the right ones, in his head.
In the bleached July sunshine, Trevor strode towards him across the asphalt and Jamie, app open, squinting at the too-slow dot on the screen, panicked. Trevor pulled to a stop and adjusted the strap of the bag against his collarbone, fingers dancing along the plastic edge.
“Jimmy, hey,” he’d said, casual, as if this wasn’t maybe only the third or fourth time they’d spoken since Jamie flew in a few days ago, and certainly the first time not in a group setting. “Glad I caught ya. Listen, I’m going for dinner at my parents’ place tonight. You wanna come with? My dad’s been asking after you. Said I’d mention it.”
Jamie had blinked. The dot on his screen was pulling closer. Beside him, Trevor reached up to scratch at his cheek, where patchy stubble was growing in. His hand, Jamie noticed, was ever-so-slightly shaking.
“Oh,” Jamie had answered. “That sounds nice. Uhm. Sure. Thanks.”
It was not as if Jamie could really say no to Trevor, anyway. His conscience wouldn’t have allowed it. Jamie cancelled the car, texted Mason to ask for a raincheck, got a ???? in reply, and then climbed into the passenger seat of Trevor’s car, pushing water bottles and discarded hoodies gently out of his way, as he’d gotten used to doing many years ago. Trevor kept up an idle chatter the whole thirty-minute drive, across the state border, mostly about the tournament and some of the other guys playing, and the effort he was making to bulk up before training camp.
He’d looked across at Jamie when he’d mentioned camp, but neither of them had said anything else about it. And then Trevor had been pulling into the drive of a nice colonial revival, with a sweeping green yard that folded around the side, and Jamie had stood on the gravel in his crusty gym shirt and beat-up sneakers, about to go and have dinner with Trevor’s parents, as if they hadn’t spent the last year and a half slowly letting the gaps between their text exchanges stretch longer and longer, until they’d petered out completely.
Trevor grabbed Jamie’s bag out of the trunk — it at least had deodorant in it, thank God — and shouldered it with his own, and jerked his head, beckoning him inside. Jamie had followed.
Turns out, Trevor’s mom hadn’t been expecting them at all.
Julie Zegras, whom Jamie had met only over facetime, whose fear of flying she’d apparently handed down to her eldest son, fussed and clucked and told them to go and busy themselves for an hour or so, so she could whip something together. Jamie had tried to apologize, but Trevor had cut over him to thank his mom, and had dumped both their bags in the hall before shepherding Jamie away to ‘show him around.’
Ava, apparently, was on holiday with her sorority sisters, Griffin lived with his girlfriend now in an apartment nearby, and Trevor’s dad was finishing his round of golf. The house was quiet. Trevor wandered in and out of rooms – TV den, lounge, dining room, games room, conservatory – as if he were trying to sell Jamie real estate. Jamie let him chatter on. Sometimes he’d point out a dent in a piece of furniture, inevitably the result of some childhood wrestling match between him and Griffin, which Trevor insisted that he’d won, actually, even if Jamie had met Griffin enough times to doubt that was true.
Up here, now, Trevor throws an arm towards the big, shuttered windows. “I used to like it, ‘cause this bedroom is nearest to the woods. I could hear all the wildlife when I was home for the summer. The crickets are mad noisy, but I always found it kinda nice,” he says. He’s rambling again, just a little. “That’s why I like it in my place at the moment, near the golf course. The place is decent enough, of course – big TV – but that’s not why I like it.” He grins, a quick flash, enough to change his face — to make Jamie realise the tension in it before. “When I have my window open, you can hear the baby frogs ribbeting out by the pond. Best alarm clock ever.”
There’s a reason, Jamie’s reminded, that Trevor used to love those damn roof sunsets so much. As much as he liked to pretend to be a city guy, at home anywhere, he was drawn to the openness of those sunsets, to the wide open space and their shifting, natural light, especially when things in Anaheim got rocky. Jamie could tell it soothed him.
“No frogs in Philadelphia, I’m afraid,” he says.
Trevor’s smile glitches and then smooths out into something smaller and more real, the corner of his mouth lifting — like he’s grateful that, for once, Jamie has shown the initiative. “Right. Yeah, I figured. Great city, though. I always liked playing there. You like it, right?”
Jamie nods. He does like it. The stakes feel a lot higher in Philly, and on most days Jamie enjoys that. It keeps him focused, stops him from getting in his own head too much. In Anaheim, sometimes the lack of hockey market audience meant that Jamie turned inward too much, got too deep in his own head, sometimes, obsessing over stats that, at the end of the day, added up to nothing.
Philadelphia doesn’t really allow for that in the same way. It terrified Jamie at first, but now he loves it. It comes with caveats, obviously, but it helps him keep his head screwed on right. He doesn’t feel so lost within it all. There’s more purpose.
On the ice, that is.
“It’s pretty sweet,” he says. “Good food scene, good crowd. Can’t complain.”
Trevor nods, and then goes to stand by the window, by the couch, looking out at the yard and the copse of trees beyond. Jamie watches his forearms flex as he leans against the sill, the ink on his sleeve jumping as the muscles twitch. “I didn’t ask for it to be Philly,” he says, with his back to Jamie.
Jamie swallows and tries to shove his hands deeper in his pockets. “I know.”
Slowly, Trevor turns around again. “I really want this to work out for me, Jimmy.” He laughs, hoarsely, painful to listen to. “I, like, really need it to. I don’t wanna get bounced again in a couple of years. I just wanna —” he reaches up and massages the heel of his palm against his shoulder, as if he’s prodding at an ache, a nervous habit Jamie had almost forgotten Trevor had until he sees it now and is reminded, pairs it with the tightness in Trevor’s jaw. “I got too excited, posting that photo on insta, I know. It was stupid. I’m not tryna step on your toes or anything. Not trying to freak you out. I know you, like, settled out there. I’m not trying to mess that up, I swear.”
Jamie runs his thumb along the side of his hotel key card in his pocket; presses the pad against the rounded corner until it cuts in and stings. He remembers seeing the photo and the way he flinched away from his phone screen, remembers feeling embarrassed — for himself, but for Trevor too. Trevor always did wear his emotions out where everyone else could see him, but this seemed a step too far. It was, undoubtedly, a fuck you to the Anaheim office, but Jamie could see the sincerity there, too — the desperation, the bid for attention. Like Trevor was just uploading his pulsing, bloody heart to the internet for people to gawp at, just to make a statement. He hadn’t known how to handle it. Now, he feels guilty about how he reacted: namely, not at all. “Z –”
Trevor’s arm drops back to his side, and he shrugs. “I just wanna enjoy playing hockey again, somewhere cool. Briere seems to really want me. It feels good, Jim.”
It isn’t a dig, or a boast, and Jamie forces himself, as he has had to do continuously since he got Briere’s call, where he was cheerily informed ‘we got your buddy!’ that just because his own trade came with less than ideal narratives attached, made him into a consolation prize and not an asset in his own right, doesn’t mean Trevor doesn’t deserve to feel wanted.
Jamie looks at the couch, at the empty sections of wall, and Trevor, standing by the window, the sunshine filtering through his summer-shorn hair, and feels any lingering tendrils of resentment fade away. Philly is going to love him. Jamie doesn’t need to bet anything to prove it. There’s no chance otherwise. He’s glad he’s going to get to witness that. To not to, for it to be some other team, New York or Carolina, or wherever, now seems completely unthinkable.
“Z,” Jamie says again. “I get it. I’m glad it’s Philly. Really. I told everyone on the team when they asked that you’re the best. I meant it.”
Trevor laughs, dry again. “The team. Right.”
He steps away from the window and toward the couch, lets himself slump backwards so he’s lying down, staring at the ceiling. He blinks a couple of times, and Jamie follows his gaze up to the faded outline of glow-in-the-dark stars, long ago fallen or removed. “Really wasn’t sure you’d come down for this, you know,” Trevor starts, still staring upwards. “I didn’t even think about suggesting it, before the trade, but I figured maybe it would be good, to see each other before September. Didn’t know if you’d agree.”
It feels weird, standing while Trevor’s not. Jamie hovers.
“You asked,” Jamie says, as if it’s that simple, when they both know it isn’t, not at all.
“Yeah? Is that it?” Trevor snorts, an ugly sound. “Come here, then.”
Jamie hesitates, then surprises himself by doing as he’s bidden. He’s not sure, exactly, what Trevor wants, until he’s stepping closer, and Trevor’s sitting up a little, and Jamie’s standing in front of him. Trevor looks up, shaking his hair out of his grey eyes.
“You know, I never actually brought anyone up here, when I was a kid,” he says.
“To your room?”
“Mmmh. Wasn’t home enough. I’m not sure it counts now. It’s not really my bedroom anymore. It’s not even a guest room.”
“Trevor —”
Trevor reaches up. The hand he slips around the back of Jamie’s knee to keep him in place is light, but firm. It makes Jamie's legs feel like they're about to buckle.
Sure enough, it's Jamie who breaks first — who lets his hand drop and brush against Trevor’s hair, who finds a strand, and gently pushes it backwards, behind his ear. Trevor’s eyes close, his eyelids shiny in the light streaming through the window, and his forehead drops towards Jamie’s exposed thigh, just below his gym shorts, as he lets out a shuddering breath.
“I’m sorry,” he says, against Jamie’s skin. “I ruined your plans, didn’t I?”
Jamie strokes his fingers through Trevor’s hair again, pulling at the familiar slight roughness of it, before he speaks.
“You’re not that sorry,” Jamie says, voice calmer than he expected it to be. “But it’s okay. Really.” He feels Trevor’s mouth twitch into a smile, brushing against his leg hair.
“You’re right, I’m not.”
Trevor presses the lightest kiss to his thigh and then leans back. He’s smiling, more genuine than Jamie’s seen all afternoon. Jamie feels like an idiot, but also like he’s gotten away with something. Turns out, he didn’t have to say sorry at all.
“We’ll do it differently this time,” Trevor says.
“Sure,” Jamie replies, hand still in Trevor’s hair.
The thing is — he's just not sure that’s possible.
