Did you ever finish the hockey fic?
Hi Anon. The short answer is no, I haven't touched it since I failed to finish it for bonesliketambourines's birthday earlier this year. Aside from short gift fics I've been working on one fic and one fic only this year - a gift for my winning bidder in the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, which is at 25k and nowhere near finished. I've had a very tricky year personally so unfortunately my writing time (and productivity, actually) has been severely curtailed.
I do have an alpha reader kindly lined up for if I ever return to that hockey fic. And I just checked and I have three scenes down. So it's nowhere near done 😅 Maybe someday! Here's one of the scenes (unedited) in which the American Quidditch team trying to sign Harry brings him to an ice hockey game. Thank you for checking in!
CW for Harry having anxiety and panic attacks
The Penguins, Harry discovered, were the local ice hockey team, and everyone on the Peregrines seemed obsessed with their chances. It wasn’t, Harry thought, as though he knew anything about ice hockey as a sport, so he settled down and began to pick pistachios out of the bag and shell them one by one. They had good seats, right behind wavering sheets of plexiglass looking onto the ice, and the arena was humming with noise as it filled up. Harry was warm in the yellow and black jersey Lorraine had bought him in the gift shop.
Harry managed not to flinch when the lights went down suddenly, and the crowd began to cheer as strobes raked across the audience. It was so loud, that was all—Harry was used to playing in the open air, where the noise was carried away, but this place, packed solid with bodies, was like a drum, with the low rhythmic beat of voices rising to a roar.
“Up!” Rodolphe shouted in his ear, and pulled him to standing, the whole arena was on their feet, and the commentator was introducing the game in that jovial, confiding voice that all sports announcers have, and everyone was swinging yellow towels around their heads, and some Muggle music was playing, bass so heavy that Harry could feel the crunch of the guitar riff through his feet. It was so much—too much—and the quivers started in his hands first, rushing in a cold spread up his arms and into his chest where they settled in a cold clenching band of anxiety around his chest, driving his breath shallower. His magic was sparking under his skin, panicked.
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” he tried to say into Lorraine’s ear, but the shouting was so loud and the lights were sparking rainbow streams over her face so she looked too strange and uncanny, and she just grinned at him, unhearing. Her teeth glowed under the blacklight.
Harry put his hands on the Plexiglass in front of him, expecting it to be cold, but it was as warm as skin to the touch, trembling with reverberations. The players were thundering onto the ice, looming shapes moving too fast for how big they were, the smooth gliding motion letting them slip in and out of Harry’s peripheral vision like so many quiet ghosts.
In, he commanded himself and sucked in air through his nose, now out, and felt the stream of breath clouding over his fingers where they cupped the glass. And again. It didn’t really help.
It wouldn’t be too much, he thought frantically, if he just put up a Notice-Me-Not and then Apparated right out. No one would hear, and Lorraine was coming by his hotel later anyway for dinner. It would be fine. It was always fine, afterwards.
And then suddenly he heard it, cutting through the racket like a clarion, sending something cold through him so that he felt himself take a deep breath in with the pure shock of it, the announcer’s booming voice shouting, “Draco— Malfoy!” and the whole arena echoed with the joyful roar of the crowd.
It wasn’t as though there could be two of them, Harry thought, not with that stupid name, though he couldn’t see which one of the players it was as they all whizzed around on the ice, faster than he had imagined they would be, all wearing helmets that would hide the even stupider Malfoy hair. But then Lorraine leaned over and shouted in his ear, “He’s one of your lot, you know, he’s English like you,” and he knew then that he was going to see Draco Malfoy play ice hockey as though that was something he could ever have expected to happen, here, half the world and half a lifetime away from Hogwarts.
At least he was feeling okay again, body fizzing with adrenaline from the very sound of Malfoy’s name in an American accent, the ridged shells of his pistachios scoring patterns into his palm, the smell of bodies and beer and burgers all around him. Everything felt very sharp and clear again.
The lights came up again as the game began, and everyone sat down, and though Lorraine looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, “You doing ok there?” Harry was able to say that he was okay, which was good.
The players all seemed to be impossibly big, and they were all so fast out there. The pace was brutally quick. Harry found Malfoy straight away though, even with the crash of the sticks and the seething mass of the bodies on the ice. His name was on the back of his black and yellow jersey, but Harry thought he’d have known him anyway, from the way he moved in the path of his stick, from the heave of his shoulders into each pass, from his ruthless, foolhardy hunt for glory in the face of the opposition.
He looked just like he did on a broom, though somewhere in the back of Harry’s mind was another memory, of Malfoy skating on the Lake in Hogwarts one severe winter, with the sky behind him a heavy metallic grey, wearing a long green scarf and old-fashioned-looking black skates on his feet, first gliding past serenely, then effortlessly turning into a long curling loop on one foot, then another, and then incongruously sticking his tongue out at Harry as he sliced across the ice too close to where Harry and Ron were inching along as close to the shore as possible. They had laughed at Malfoy, Harry thought, leaning into each other and keeping each other upright, and Harry remembered thinking Malfoy was ridiculous, affected. Malfoy didn’t look ridiculous out there today. He just looked competent and strong and a bit dangerous. Harry shook his head a bit, to clear it.
