something in the way you move? ☺️ any scene you want
Oh man, so many possibilities! Let's go with this section of chapter 4, in the middle of the conversation Matthew initiated about Leon's suppressants (a Matthew POV scene):
Leon doesn’t look reassured. If anything, he looks sick.
“I’m not supposed to,” he says. His voice is shaky and anxious. [If it isn't already abundantly clear, if there's an opportunity to make one or both of these boys shake or tremble or show any physical manifestation of their emotional hurt and pain, I will seize it with both hands and shake it until it falls apart.]
“Not supposed to what?” Matthew asks.
“Tell anyone.”
“What, about the meds? Did some asshole in Edmonton tell you that?” Leon nods, though he looks a little unsure about Matthew’s use of the word asshole. That’s probably going to take awhile to undo. “Well, fuck them. They’re not the boss of you anymore.” [I have used almost this exact sentence in at least three fics and I guarantee I'll do it again. Google Docs wants to correct my grammar each time, but it's not the boss of me.] Matthew pauses for a minute, running over what Leon just said. “So none of your teammates there knew about this?” Leon nods again. “But they never noticed that anything was off, even though they knew you were an alpha? Who were you scenting with?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, I know you said you didn’t have an arrangement there like we have,” Matthew says. “But didn’t anyone try to scent with you after you’d presented? Didn’t anyone figure it out?” [They did not, because they suck, and Matthew is going to spend the rest of his life relishing any opportunity to make the Oilers pay.]
Leon furrows his brow and Matthew has a sinking feeling that he’s not going to enjoy hearing whatever is coming next.
“I wasn’t allowed.”
“You weren’t allowed to what? To scent with anyone?”
“To be around the team.”
Stupid language barriers. Matthew really should have downloaded Duolingo when he first found out that Leon was coming. That’ll be his New Year’s resolution this year, so they don’t have to stumble through conversations that can’t possibly mean what they sound like. [This is a bit of a throwaway line, but Matthew is definitely going to download Duolingo and not tell Leon about it until he can fumble through something incredibly sweet and romantic in heavily accented German.]
“For dynamics stuff?” Matthew asks, because anything else would make even less sense.
“For anything.”
“Leon, what are you talking about?” His voice is practically a squeak and it’s certainly not giving cool calm and collected, but he has no idea what Leon is saying.
“Alphas are a liability,” Leon says simply, and it sounds like he’s reciting something he’s heard many, many times. [Because he has. It's one of the first things management said to him and one of the things they repeated the most.] “The Oilers took a huge risk keeping me after I presented, they couldn’t also risk me interfering with the rest of the team or their bonds. I had to stay away from them and they had to stay away from me.” [In my brain map, the Oilers were pretty explicit with Leon about their (ghastly) expectations of him, but the effect on the rest of the team was more indirect and insidious. No one sat all of them down as a group and outright said alphas are bad, stay away from Draisaitl off the ice. Rather, they saw how the coaching staff and a few select players started to cut him down and mistreat him, and they absorbed it and followed suit.]
“Leon.” It’s the only word that’s coming to him. He grapples for something else to say. “Leon. What?”
“What?” [Oh Leon, sweet boy. He really doesn't understand why Matthew is confused. It's all so obvious to him and so bewildering to Matthew.]
Matthew doesn’t know how much more he can take of Leon saying absolutely outrageous things like they’re par for the course and then being confused by Matthew’s shock. “You weren’t allowed to be around the team? For—for anything?”
“No, we had approved team events that I was allowed at,” Leon explains. “And we did social media stuff together sometimes.” [I see the social media stuff as one of the things that they did do on occasion soon after Leon presented and it dwindled over the years. So much of the cruelty in what the Oilers did to Leon was gradual, which is one of the reasons it's so hard for him to see how wrong it was. It's the boiling frog technique, ultimately.]
“But—but what about going out after games? Or hanging out together, or being around the omegas after losing? I know the meds affect that, but…fuck, Leon, what about your friends?”
Leon just stares at him. [Yes, I love one brief sentence to interrupt a flow.]
There’s no way. There’s no way that an NHL team explicitly barred one of their players — one of their best players — from spending time with his teammates.
“Leon, I’m sorry, I just don’t understand. You and McDavid are friends.” A flash of pain darts across Leon’s face when Matthew mentions McDavid and he wishes he could take it back.
“That was an accident. A mistake. He didn’t understand that he was supposed to stay away from me, when he first got there and it was all new. They gave him some leeway for a while because, you know. He’s Connor McDavid. He decided he liked me when we first met, so they went along with it for a bit. But they couldn’t just let it go on forever. It wasn’t safe. I didn’t understand all the rules right away either, but some of the older guys explained it.” [Leon doesn't have the language for it or understanding of it at this point, but he is tremendously traumatized by what Connor specifically did to him. Connor came onto their team with a huge amount of power from the jump, and it was a deep betrayal of Leon that he actively chose not to help him even though they had been friends in the beginning. Connor and Matthew didn't grow up all that differently -- neither of them comes from a family or an environment that vilifies alphas the way the Oilers do -- but Matthew's reaction to Leon's situation was immediate horror and an instinct to fix it while Connor's was to look the other way because hey, it wasn't hurting him. And he would never rock the boat of his own success/future for someone else's sake. Leon coming to see Connor as a bad guy in his story is quite important to his growth. And immensely satisfying for Matthew.]
Matthew stands up, then sits back down again. It feels like his arms and legs don’t fit right, like he’s being stretched in different directions. He wants to run very far very fast and also wants to lie down on the floor for a week.
“So…is that what you meant when you said you didn’t want to overstep, when I told you to come out with the team more?” he asks. “That you thought you shouldn’t be there because—because you’re an alpha?” [It genuinely never crossed Matthew's mind before that this is the root of the problem. When I first started thinking about this fic, I was planning to write it in only one POV. I switched to both because I had so much inspiration for both Matthew and Leon's perspectives (and so many specific lines that came to mind for both), and I'm really glad I did because I think a lot of the strength of the story comes from their wildly different perceptions of the same situation or information. Matthew doesn't understand Leon's past, Leon doesn't understand Matthew's present.]
It’s like he’s taken a sip of something that turned out to be straight vinegar. That’s why Leon was so standoffish about meeting the boys before the season started. Why he never joins in on group bonding, no matter how informal it is, and why Matthew has to practically drag him out by his hair to get him to come to dinner or drinks. And that…fuck, that’s why he thought he was going to get in trouble for Trouba targeting him in New York. [If there's one thing I can thank Trouba for, it's giving so many of us an easy background league villain.]
The last time Matthew was this nauseated, he was playing a hockey game with a fractured sternum. This might hurt more. [I LOVE THIS TINY PARAGRAPH SO MUCH. THAT'S ALL.]
“Well, yeah,” Leon says. Matthew closes his eyes against the wave of dismay that sweeps through his chest. [I would be terrified to add up how many times I've referred to a character feeling something in their chest. Nobody tell me.]
“I’m not—I can’t—“ He stops himself to take a breath so he doesn’t give himself an aneurysm. “Leon. I don’t even know how to tell you how fucked-up that is.”
It’s the wrong choice of words. Leon hunches in on himself, looking ashamed and miserable. [See above: physical manifestation of emotional hurt and pain. Also, I think shame is one of the most important descriptors of Leon's state of mind for the whole first half of the fic. Shame over being an alpha, shame over what he sees as his weakness in handling it, shame over what he thinks he's done to others, now shame over Matthew knowing more of the truth. And him starting to release himself from that shame is so important to the second half.]
