It’s a strange feeling, knowing that everyone around you is watching you, waiting for the moment you’re going to choke. Even some of his teammates are thinking it - Isaac knows this, and doesn’t really hold it against them. It stings, but he lets it go. After all, if he was them, he’d be waiting to see him choke too.
The interviews haven’t gone well. Meeting his team has gone… better, but not what Isaac would call well. His new coach seems like a hardass, and his new accommodations suck. Nothing about this is going as it should have gone. It makes sense that his first game would follow in pattern.
Standing across from him before puck drop is some jumped up young man with a tilt to his chin and a spark in his eyes radiating something to prove. Isaac sees it coming before it starts, knows this man is about to try and make his name off psyching out the Miracle of Minneapolis before he’s scored his first goal. He knows what the speculation says about him, and it’s exactly what this man mutters across the ice to him now, too low for the ref to hear but clear enough for the cameras to pick up what he’s saying if the person behind them has any skill at lip reading. All cameras are trained on them, save a few over at the actual puck drop, waiting to catch the priceless moment that Isaac Jensen’s nerve snaps. That all the things they’ve said about him - volatile, nervous, good in the minors but no spine for the big leagues - will be proven true in a fizzle of sparks, all that comes of a much-hyped firework.
“You’ll never make it here.” Low, creeping across the ice.
Isaac tilts his head a little, looking at the man across him through his visor, the narrowed blue eyes, the sneer of the thin mouth, and feels his own lips pull into a slight smile. He holds steady the gaze of the man whose name he never quite caught and says, voice as steel as the spine that holds his head high, “Watch me.”
like ok “Watch me.” in that context seems really dramatic and avant-garde but once we take into account that isaac is eighteen entire years old it is perfectly in character and realistic
In the end, the Phoenixes don’t make it to the second round of playoffs.
They lose in game seven, and everyone knows it’s coming. They fight hard for it, and the loss comes with heads held high. When the buzzer goes, as the other team swarms the ice to celebrate their victory, Kai Mäkelä is off the Phoenixes bench in seconds. Jean-Pierre watches him skate over and skid to a stop in front of Iestyn Thomas, the tops of their goalie masks pressed together as they speak quietly for several moments.
Jean-Pierre looks from them out across the ice, gauging the general mood of his teammates. They’re not overjoyed to have lost, of course, but there’s a kind of victory in making it this far, when not long ago even Minnesota sportscasters claimed them long shots without a hope of so much as seeing round one. There’s disappointment in Jean-Pierre’s chest at having come so close, but there’s triumph too.
A tap on his shoulder draws Jean-Pierre’s attention away from Marcus Graham, next to his brother on the ice with his hand pressed to his jersey just below his left collarbone. He looks at Blažej, standing beside him at the bench, eyebrow raised in question. Blažej indicates with his chin, and Jean-Pierre’s eyes sweep out in the direction he’s nodding in. He finds what Blažej wants him to see almost immediately, and his breath catches in his throat.
Out on the ice, some distance from the twins, Isaac is hip to hip with Jesse, one hand curled over the rookie’s shoulder. He’s speaking, too far away for Jean-Pierre to hear, but seems to reach the end of what he’s saying quickly, after which they both stand still. This isn’t what brings Jean-Pierre up short. No, that is the look on Isaac’s face, the way he’s standing.
Isaac is looking at Jesse, mouth curled into a faint smile. His back is straight and his shoulders are back. There’s something to the tilt of his chin, the raise of his head that has nothing to do with the two inches of height Jesse boasts over him. Isaac looks... he looks happy.
He looks strong. Proud.
It’s some kind of impulse that sends Jean-Pierre’s hand out, searching without visual guidance until it finds Blažej’s, squeezing his captain’s fingers tightly to his palm. Blažej’s voice, drifting through the sounds of the still-cheering crowd, is warm and kind. He doesn’t sound like they just lost. Not in any way that matters.
“Has been a good year.”
Jean-Pierre gives his hand a little shake, hearing all the things behind the words that Blažej didn’t say. “Yeah, it has. We did good, B. We did really good.”
Somehow, it doesn’t feel like they’ve lost at all.
“Okay. Y’know what? JP, come over here.” She calls the last bit in a near shout, waving him to approach.
“Antoinette-”
A look from her silences Isaac immediately. JP ambles over with a walk far too slow and easy for someone crossing the lawn of an empty army barracks during the aftermath of the apocalypse. Everything about him is a contradiction in terms, and he looks, strolling towards them with his three-year-old balanced on his hip, like he’s at a backyard barbeque, so freakishly normal.
“What’s going on, Toinette? Is everything okay?” JP asks when he reaches them.
“I’m making things official. This is getting ridiculous.” Antoinette plants a hand firmly on Isaac’s skeptical shoulder, looks him squarely in the face, and says solemnly, “Isaac Oliver Jensen, I, Antoinette Delacroix, by the power vested in me by the end of the world, do hereby pronounce you adopted. Officially.” Her other hand comes up to his other shoulder. She gives him the tiniest of gentle shakes. “Now you’re my nephew. Really. We can get Michelle to write us some kind of paperwork or whatever, she was in law school Before, yeah?”
His face as she looks at him is guarded, clearly trying to work out if she’s making fun of him or not. While his eyebrows are furrowed into a hard line, his cheeks are flushed red. It’s clear he’s embarrassed. Antoinette resists the urge to roll her eyes or sigh again, focusing on the exasperation rather than the dull ache still throbbing tenderly behind her sternum. She hooks her arm around his back, pulling him into her side and pressing a quick kiss to his temple. She smiles at JP.
“Right?”
There’s laughter in the creases on JP’s face, eyes crinkled by his amused smile. “Right.”
“Is this a joke?” Isaac blurts out before he can stop himself.
This is which the point at which Antoinette Delacroix, known Before for the patience she inherited from her mother, felt that patience snap. She releases Isaac from under her arm and turns to face him, hands propped on her hips.
“Isaac, cheri, it’s been four years, and I love you, but it’s high time you started believing me when I tell you that, believing us. I get why you’re…” Waving a hand around, Antoinette gives up on the sentence. “I get it, and I don’t blame you, but calisse, kid, it’s done. You’re ours. It’s been four years, and I could very well die tomorrow, and I’ll be damned if the nephew I leave behind doesn’t believe that’s what he is. This is as official and real as we can make this. You want witnesses? Here we go.” She waves at Bonnie and Ronan, indicating that they should come over.
“Antoinette you really don’t have to do that, I get the point, okay? I know.”
Except that when she gets on a roll you either get out of the way or get run over, and Antoinette gives him a look and continues speaking. “You know now, but what about tomorrow? What about next week? What about in six months?” Something about her demeanor has gotten just slightly hysterical, and Isaac feels a tendril of worry creep into him as she goes on. “My mother was an honest woman, Isaac. She told us when we were doing right and when we were doing wrong and no matter what, we knew she loved us, because she told us every day. My mother raised me to understand the power behind my words, and I don’t know if she’s alive or dead right now, I know any of us could die at any moment, and I know that I do not want to die before I give you something to hold onto for when you don’t know. I sure as hell know I don’t want you to die before you have that. Okay?”
Isaac finds himself stunned speechless. He’d always thought she was handling this unnervingly well, and now he’s getting a look at what’s really going on with her. She steps towards him, and the contrast between the intensity in her voice and the slow gentleness of her hands, coming up to grip either side of his face, is startling.
“My brother and his children are all the family I know I have left.” Antoinette swallows, clearing her throat before continuing. Her eyes are a little too bright and there’s a hoarse, raw edge in her voice. “Please, mon neveu bien-aime, let me hold onto that as tight as I can.”
Hockeyverse ask game: 11 / 13 / 18 / 23 (not everyone but like Isaac, JP, Piotr, Uwe, Kai, and Derek)
11. which line from the novel most represents it as a whole?
“You were never supposed to have to do this alone.”
13. sort your characters into harry potter houses!
Isaac is a fucking mystery, JP is the most Hufflepuff person ever to have lived, Piotr is a Gryffindor, Uwe is Griffyndor, Kai is a Hufflepuff, and Derek is a Slytherin
18. pick a font to represent each character
i kind of already did this
isaac
jp
piotr
uwe
kai
derek
23. which character has the best handwriting? worst?
isaac’s handwriting is…… not great. derek’s is gorgeous.
darkmetinenephelae replied to your post “Hockeyverse ask game: 11 / 13 / 18 / 23 (not everyone but like Isaac,...”
If u want my $0.02 on Issacs house: he seems to me like a hufflepuff who loves his people but for a long time never had any people to be loyal to. I am not, however, the writer in possession of Issac so like. Ur opinion or lack thereof is most important tbh
Jesse’s phone goes off with a low buzz, the screen lighting up. It’s an alert from theScore, telling him about a goal from a player he’s subscribed to notifications for, and he smiles upon reading the message.
Toronto Goal: J. Roen
TOR 1, MCH 0 (10:28 1st)
“What’s up?” Isaac asks, walking into the living room and sitting on the other end of the couch.
“Joey scored, first goal of the game. Thunder’s playing Michigan.”
“Joey Roen, you mean? You know him?” Isaac sounds curious, and Jesse realizes that he hasn’t yet mentioned his history with the brand new captain of the Toronto Thunder to his new roommates yet.
“Oops, yeah, he was the other winger on my line in Juniors. We got along pretty well, he got drafted last year and I stayed in North Dakota. Fastest skater I’ve ever met.”
“And now he’s the captain of the Thunder, huh.” Nothing in Isaac’s voice betrays how he feels about that, though the careful neutrality should be a message on its own. His voice is flat and toneless, and Jesse shakes his head, looking down at his phone right as the second alert comes through, not even three minutes after the first.
Toronto Goal: J. Roen
TOR 2, MCH 0 (12:00 1st)
“Youngest ever in the league,” mutters Jesse in confirmation, though they both already knew that.
Jesse and Joey were good friends in juniors, played alongside one another for a significant amount of time, had a lot of fun off the ice, too. They’d parted ways as far as hockey went when Joey got drafted first overall to Toronto, the year before Jesse decided he was ready and entered the draft himself. It’s not something Jesse is particularly proud of, how they’ve lost touch, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. He thinks about Joey a lot, and they’ve texted more since they both entered the league, rebuilding some of what was forgotten about.
Their teams will face one another for the first time since Jesse’s drafting and Joey’s captaincy in three days, when the Thunder comes down to Minneapolis and the two juniors linemates will square off in a highly publicized and hyped confrontation. Jesse thinks it’s funny, the way the game is being advertised like some kind of boxing grudge match.
Truth is, he’s excited to play against his old friend. It’ll be the first time they’ve seen each other in months, and Jesse’s looking forward to catching up after the game. The Thunder have a larger than normal gap of time between that game and their next one, and so the team will be hanging around long enough for them to have dinner.
Jesse tries not to think about the worry creeping in at the edge of his mind, every time he sees a presser on the television with Joey at the center of a crowd of reporters, smile plastered on his face and exhaustion in his eyes that Jesse still knows him well enough to see. He tries not to think about the things he’s heard about Toronto’s coach. He tries to keep out memories of how Derek, Eliot, and the twins will gather around phones whenever the latest drama kicks up and he’s said some new outlandish thing about his ‘strategies’, laughing over how ridiculous it all is.
Swallowing hard and clearing his mind, Jesse thinks of Joey’s two goals in less than as many minutes. He focuses on memories of Joey helping him prank Michelle, pickup games with Brigit and her friends. Whatever is going on in Toronto, Jesse will find out on Friday. For now, though, he thinks about Joey smiling, and tries to convince himself that it’s all going to be fine.
It’s so long after that he’s almost forgotten the game is going on when he gets another alert.
