⋆｡°✩ have you seen me?
⋆ ౨ৎ˚ ⋆ ˚ synopsis: while his daughter is sleeping, brad marchand brings sidney’s attention to a group of pittsburgh fans who have a sickening hatred for his daughter. (4.2k)
⋆ ౨ৎ˚ ⋆ ˚ contents: the horrifying landscape that is twitter, these tweets are based on actual hate campaigns the author has seen, typical-stan hate accounts, photoshopped/fake gore, stalking, sidney yells once, crying
⋆ ౨ৎ˚ ⋆ ˚: sidney crosby x daughter!character
⋆ ౨ৎ˚ ⋆ ˚ a/n: hello! read the contents and ward carefully!! this was originally written for a different person, but sidcros called! so if there are any naming mistakes, forgive me!
masterlist
Shamefully, Sidney finds out about it all through Brad Marchand of all people.
He's nearly sunken into the couch, layered underneath thick throw blankets and his daughter, her socked feet pressing into his hip.
A random movie is playing on the TV, bathing the room in a series of blues and purples. His daughter is a soft weight against him, a well-worn Minnesota shirt hanging off her shoulders, a splattering of signatures embedded into the fabric.
She's got one hand cradling her cheek as she sleeps up against Sam, his paws pressing up against her hair. The other hand is fisting a handful of a throw blanket underneath her chin, bundled up as a makeshift pillow. He's got the urge to take a photo of her, peaceful in sleep.
His phone buzzes once, then twice, on the coffee table. At first, he's content to leave it be. After all, it's nearly 11 P.M. on a Saturday night, in Pittsburgh, and it was well-known that he spent a good chunk of his free nights with his daughter. (They had spent the day at home, having an impromptu movie day. His daughter had shown him what seemed to be a million new clothes, excitedly chattering about the upcoming summer. It had been everything he needed before a playoff run.)
But, instead of stopping, his phone continued to buzz, nearly vibrating itself off the table.
Carefully, he grabs hold of his daughter's ankles, lifting her feet off his lap as he leans forward to grab his still buzzing phone, dropping them back down once he's got it in his hand. As he turns the screen on, he's immediately bombarded by a million notifications with Brad Marchand's name on every single one.
Brad Marchand (11:23): Hey, I'm going to assume you haven't seen this yet, and I hope your kiddo hasn't either.
Brad Marchand (11:23): https://twitter.com//2030094960507093254?s=20
Brad Marchand (11:24):https://twitter.com//crosby//20300949605001392?.a=20
Brad Marchand (11:25): Hold on, I'll send you a few more. I've already reached out to Mackinnon about it all. He's pretty active on Twitter. I think he'll do some good damage control.
He furrows his brows before clicking on the link, waiting for his browser to load.
It spins once, then twice, before the screen loads through, the familiar white background of Twitter filling his screen, and immediately, his screen is flooded. Photos upon photos of his own daughter fill the screen: her at the mall, at ballet class, in the box at games, scurrying down Pittsburgh's streets.
She's not looking at the camera in any of the blurry photos, more often than not, mid-scurry. They're all taken from a distance, slightly blurry, the pixels distorted from the zoom.
He clicked on one labeled Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, 03:23, 11.12. He was so caught up in looking at the photo of his daughter through a window, mid-spin amongst her classmates, that he nearly missed the first response to the picture.
Nearly.
His eyes flickered down, then shoot open.
Underneath the original photo, a grossly edited photo of his daughter stared back up at him, nauseatingly realistic looking. If his daughter hadn't been right next to him, snoring her head off into a pillow, Sidney would've vomited if he saw the photos. If he had been on a roadie, he would've flown home, driven by nothing but the need to see his daughter breathing.
Even with her, half-sprawled on his lap, his fingers still wander to her tibial pulse point, feeling the soft thumping underneath his thumb as he stares at the photo. The fuzz of her Hello Kitty socks is warm against the exposed skin of his hip as he clicks onto the photo, nausea churning in his stomach.
Bloomed over his screen is a photoshopped image of his daughter, stuffed into a barrel; her skin is pale and blooming with darkened veins, sickly shades of green and blue decorating her screen. Her eyes, normally a dark brown that mirrors his, are blown wide and cloudy, her pupils a cloudy grey.
The longer he looks, the more obvious it becomes that it's photoshopped. Her freckles are missing, her nose isn't quite right, nor is the curl pattern of her hair. In the comments, someone is raving about how realistic it looks, and how the movie Megan is Missing had 'god plenty of screengrabs to use in edits'.
Nonetheless, he surges off the couch, ignoring the low noise of complaint before the snoring returns, her feet now tucked underneath the abandoned blankets.
He goes back to the other link, clicks, clicks once more, and is faced with the same setup: his daughter, or his daughter's body in this instance, lying on a rug with her head missing, splashes of red covering her body.
He recognizes this photo- it had been one Geno had posted for her birthday. In the original photo, she'd been cradling Sam in the crook of her arm, dressed like him for Halloween, her makeup smudged as he lapped licks all over her cheeks. In that photo, she had been wide-eyed and grinning, her mouth stained neon blue from a lollipop.
Hell, that's Sidney's rug underneath her, photoshopped all bloody. The same rug is right in front of his bed, a mere staircase away, unstained.
He clicks another: his daughter, photoshopped onto a stage, neck bent at an awkward angle. He recognizes the photo from his daughter's school's performance of Giselle, she had 'died' in the first act, crumpled onto the stage. In the original photo, there's the smallest uptick of a smile on her lips.
Another of her crumpled on a sidewalk, blood all around her body, crushed like a snail on concrete. That photo had been posted by the Penguin's Instagram page to announce the Little Penguin's chalk day. In the original photo, she's lying on top of a poorly drawn unicorn, grinning from ear to ear.
He clicks on another, and another, and another.
⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩
By three in the morning, Sidney has puked twice.
Once, it was from the low boil of anger in his stomach, settling uneasily against his dinner. He had momentarily retreated to the kitchen to puke in the sink, unwilling to move too far from his still-sleeping daughter, keeping an eye on her from over the cabinet tops.
The second time had been from a particularly gruesome photo. It had been an edited photo that his mother had posted on Facebook; one of his daughter sitting in front of a fire, proudly showing off a well-toasted marshmallow. He didn't even want to think about what the edited photo looked like; the charred glimpse of his daughter was enough to send him back to the sink.
He's called a half-asleep Marchand back, called an angry, wide-awake Nate MacKinnon, sent an email to the PR department, and downloaded Twitter.
He's also embarrassingly moved his daughter into his bedroom, promptly locked all the windows and doors, and dragged in a kitchen chair. Now, he sits like a sentinel at the edge of the bed, still clasping her ankle. All he can do is watch the time slip by on the bedside clock.
He's seen every possible image of his daughter, photoshopped in some grotesque pose, attached to a simple photo of her through her everyday life. He's scrolled through hundreds of tweets condemning his baby girl to death, endless, nonsensical rants about how she was dragging the team down. (As if! His baby girl had been such a pillar in his career; Sidney's not even sure if he'd be able to continue chugging along if she died. In the event his daughter ever died, far before her time, when Sidney himself was still on Earth, the world would never see Sidney Crosby again. He'd spend his days tucked away in Halifax, roaming the halls of a too-empty lakehouse.)
His baby.
The same little girl who still slept tucked into his side, who enjoyed playing Sudoku of all games, and made elaborate yogurt bowls in the morning. The same girl who still had him braid her hair in the mornings, still slept in themed pajamas with a stuffed animal in the crook of her arm; the same one who called him Papa with undertones of a well-developed Canadian accent. The same little girl whom he had cradled in his arms all those years ago, still pink and crinkly from birth, with a head full of hair.
His daughter, whom he had raised since she was a little toothy baby.
Sidney's daughter. His daughter- his flesh, blood, and DNA.
His daughter, who, according to a small chunk of his own fans, deserved to die.
⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩
By six, the PR department has gotten back in touch with him.
There's a drafted message sitting in his Twitter drafts, queued to post at nine, brimming with poorly contained anger, scathing, and demeaning. It's four paragraphs in length, neatly typed out and spaced, a condemnation of his own fans. It pairs nicely with the damage Nate has been kicking up on Twitter, accompanied by Marchy's Instagram stories of Sidney's daughter rolling around with his own daughters, with a short, scathing caption.
(From his spot on the chair, he can see his daughter's phone buzzing on her bedside table, the dimmed screen flashing.)
The panic has drifted from his body now, replaced by a burning anger. He's got a fistful of the comforter in his hands, nails digging into the soft fabric, knuckles white. The middle of his lower lip is bleeding, raw from where he's been biting down on it.
His daughter has barely moved. Her cheeks are still endearingly smushed into the pillows, drool pooling on her chin as she snores, her eyebrows twitching. He's moved from the chair to the bed, keeping one large hand on her curls, nails scraping against her scalp. He can't bring himself to be away from her any longer, not while she's been… condemned to death right under his nose.
It feels like he's failed somehow. How did he, as a father, miss this? Did she know about it? Had his daughter seen the seemingly endless images of her and felt like she couldn't tell him? Had she scrolled the same way he had, a morbid curiosity burning in her stomach as she continued to flick through the fake images? Did she sit in front of her mirror and cock her head- like she does whenever her pigtails are uneven, and imagine herself splattered on the concrete? As she walked down the sidewalks of Pittsburgh, flanked by her ballet friends, did she imagine a car slamming into her?
How had he missed the fact that people were stalking his daughter? How did he not notice the slew of photos of his daughter on the internet, unaware that the camera was pointed at her, capturing her everyday life? Or, had she known? Did she wake every morning knowing that somewhere in Pittsburgh, people were waiting for her, their computers loaded up with screen grabs of gory death scenes from movies, ready to photobash her into a corpse?
He feels like an outsider. Like a helpless bystander watching a slow-mo car crash, unable to do anything without the proper knowledge of what happened—
-her phone flashes again.
He's grabbing her phone before he can even think about it, thumb gliding over the numbers, 8778. It buzzes in his hands again, notifications popping up on the screen as it unlocks.
Floods of Twitter mentions fill her screen, numerous messages popping up before they're pushed down by more. There are a few other messages, three from Nate and two from Marchy, a handful of notifications from Instagram mentions, and a singular missed call from a spam number.
However, it's a text message that catches his eye:
emma: lmao, have u seen this one? absolutely wild! i'm pretty sure this one is from the walking dead lol, u look similar to their zombies.
Sidney clicks the link.
It's another picture of his daughter, grossly mutated, just barely identifiable. This time, it's a screengrab from one of his own interviews, his daughter curled into his stall, half-propped against the wall, sleeping.
At the time, she had been quietly snoring, just barely audible enough to be picked up by the microphones. Geno had been laughing in the background the entire time, bending over to prod at her cheeks as Sidney himself tried not to laugh, unable to properly answer one of the interviewer's questions, fumbling a response about the Avalanche.
When they had shuffled off, he had taken a photo of her, his chest bursting with fondness at the sight of her.
Now, he barely recognizes her.
In the new photo, her face is mashed in, obviously a layer from a zombie movie, as there are large bite marks scattered over the visible skin. The arm that had been tucked underneath her neck was gone, alongside one of her socked feet that had been hanging over the edge of his stall. She does, in fact, look like a zombie from The Walking Dead.
While it's not the most gruesome photo he's seen tonight, it still sends a massive shiver up his spine.
⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩
By the time his daughter finally stirs awake, the PR-approved statement has been posted. He's not in the lineup for tomorrow’s open practice, nor is she expected to attend her ballet classes this week. Her phone has been stuffed away in Sidney's bedside table, completely shut off, hidden away from her eyes. When she gets it back, she'll note that her Twitter password and recovery email have been changed.
But that's all later.
Now, she groans, limbs stretching out as she stretches, twisting deeper into the sheets. He's moved from his chair to sit on the edge of the bed, a hand cupping her cheek, rubbing his thumb over the crease between her brows. She smiles up at him, eyes bleary and unfocused as she blinks away sleep, her eyes hooded.
“Go-oood Morning, Papa, Sam," sweetly, his daughter hiccups in the midst of her good mornings, stretching out a hand to pat Sam's head. His stomach plummets as her eyes flutter shut, muttering underneath her breath.
He's got half the mind to immediately launch into interrogative mode, to shake his daughter until he understands why she had hidden this from him; to understand why she hadn't come to him when the first photo of her fake mutilated body came across her screen.
Instead, he grabs her by the waist and maneuvers them until he's up against the headboard, her head lolling onto his shoulder, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. He cradles her face in his hands, soaking in the sight of his breathing, lively daughter.
She's warm with life, cheeks flushed with still-pumping blood as she yawns, heavy huffs of breath pushing through her nose. She jerks back with wide eyes as her stomach rumbles with hunger, momentarily embarrassed by the loud noises. So unapologetically alive.
She opens her mouth, likely about to ask for breakfast, when he strikes.
"Emma sent you something interesting this morning."
His daughter stiffens, shoulders baring out; any previous laxity is gone, replaced by weariness. Ever so softly, she pushes against him, trying to withdraw from his grasp. But Sidney doesn't budge. He allows himself to grab onto her sides instead, taking her silence for the admission of guilt. She knows exactly what he’s talking about.
Her brows furrow together, slanting down, eyes darting around his face. Then, slowly, they slide over to where her phone had been sitting upon the bedside table, now gone. She blinks once, then twice, before promptly opening and closing her mouth.
They just blink at each other for a few minutes. As if sensing the tension, Sam sneezes before he rolls off the bed, his paws clicking against the hardwood as he retreats. His daughter huffs low, her shoulders drooping, blinking up at him with still-tired eyes.
“You, uh, weren't supposed to see that-"
"Were you going to tell me?"
She blinks at him, eyebrows raised as if she weren't expecting him to ask. She hesitates for the shortest of moments, uneased, "No."
No. No, Dad, I wasn't going to tell you people are following me through Pittsburgh and editing photos of me into corpses. No, Papa, I wasn't going to tell you that @SidCrosbLuvr1223 thinks I should jump off of PPG Arena because I'm obviously the reason the Penguins lost last week's game. No, Papa, I wasn't going to tell you that-
“I didn't want to worry you. It's, uh, just some photos. I didn't really think that it would be this big of an issue-"
"Because you didn't think!"
His voice comes out sharper than intended, bordering on a snap as she pulls back, anger dancing across her face. Before she can get another word out, he's barreling forwards, nearly frantic. They're both rearing up in the same anger, the same slant of their eyes, and clench of their jaw. If Sidney's teeth hadn't been knocked loose and replaced, he'd be in awe of the impressive size of her canines that once rivaled his.
“In what world would I not want to know that people are stalking you? I cannot fathom why you wouldn't tell me about this-"
"I didn't want to worry you before playoffs-"
"It's my job to worry about you! You're my child! I think I deserve to know whenever my child is in trouble, and I sure as hell deserve to know that she's getting death threats-"
"Would you just calm down, Jesus! It's not that deep-"
"I just saw a photo of you without your head! Marchand saw a photo of you in a barrel! What the hell do you think would've happened if I saw that on a roadie? Huh? What do you think I would've done if I were in Canada and saw a photo of you splattered on the concrete?"
"They're fake-"
"Goddamnit, that's not the point!"
Horrifyingly, Sidney realizes that his daughter is crying.
Despite the fact that her face is flushed in anger, her brows furrowed so low that they're nearly touching, jaw clenched tight enough to crack, she's crying. Tears brimmed in her waterline, clumping her lashes together, threatening to spill over. Her eyes have gone glossy; her usual dark eyes are glittery in the dimmed lighting of the bedside lamps. Her throat bobs with unmurmured cries, periodically swallowing back cries.
A single sniffle dissipates his anger as quickly as it came, swallowed by a chest-deep agony, a mournful noise bullying its way out of his throat. With a single tug, he pulls her down, pressing his chin to the top of her head. Slowly, he feels the coolness of tears soaking his shirt, periodically muffled sniffles filling the air.
He breathes once, then twice, scratching at her scalp with one of his hands, the other rubbing her back in circular, soothing motions. Just like when she was a small baby, when his hand used to span the entirety of her back.
"Sweetpea, you're my world. You're my baby, you understand me? It is never your responsibility to worry about my feelings; you have to tell me these things so I can keep you safe," his daughter makes a low, mournful noise, dragging her head across his shoulder in disagreement.
"No, no. Listen to me, you're my baby, alright? It's my job to keep you safe, to keep you happy and healthy. If anything- fuck, if anything happened to you, I don't know what I'd do. What if those people got violent? What if they followed you one day and just took you? If they can kill you over a screen, surely they can do it in person-"
Even more horrifyingly, Sidney realizes he's crying. They're not the same thick sobs that his daughter is muffling; instead, they silently slip down his face, trailing to the corners of his mouth as he struggles to swallow around the sudden thickness of his throat.
He buries his face into her unbrushed curls, inhaling the scent of her shampoo as he rocks them back and forth, holding her as closely as possible.
"I'm not mad at you, Sweetpea. I'm mad at this situation. I'm mad that people think they have the right to say these things about you, that they make those god-awful photos and don't feel shame about it. I'm so mad, I don't think I can even think straight. Just- just know that I'm not mad at you."
All he gets is a muffled noise of agreement and a slow nod. Perhaps it had been harsh of him to yell, maybe, if he wasn't so scared, he would've handled it better, gentler. But, even with her pressed in his arms, sniffling against the skin of his collarbone, flashes of the photos still paint themselves across his brain.
She doesn't say anything when he holds her a little tighter.
⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩
“Alright, c'mon, baby. I think Sam is about to eat our trash if we don't get him breakfast soon."
The joke falls slightly flat as she rolls sideways out of his arms, flopping back onto the bed with a muted sniffle. Still, she cracks a small smile. It'll be tense for a few hours, as it always is after they fight. They'll both be balanced on a quick trigger with their anger, their emotions frayed raw.
But they'll both orbit one another.
She'll follow him to the rooms throughout their house, unwilling to let anger separate them during the scant hours of free time they have together during the season. He'll track her whenever she steps away for something, quietly keeping watch as she skitters throughout the halls.
At some point, the anger will morph into something softer, something rawer. But, until then, they'll just rotate around one another. So, Sidney watches as she shuffles into the bathroom, the sound of the shower starting up filling the room as steam creeps through the door.
He doesn't move from the bed.
It's only when the shower shuts off that he moves, stepping over that godforsaken rug as he heads to the kitchen.
⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩
Now that Sidney knows, the tweets have mostly stopped.
He doesn't know if it was from the response or the sheer amount of cussing and kicking Nate had been doing on Twitter, alongside Marchy's posts. Perhaps it was the photo carousel that Geno had posted of him with Sidney's daughter. Geno had captioned it, Маленький Пингвин — я её люблю. Little Penguin, I love her.
(The first photo was taken at the 2007 NHL Awards when Sidney himself was just nineteen, Geno had been twenty, and his daughter had been just a few months old. In said photo, Geno's got her propped up against his chest, both of them smiling at the camera. In the background, Sidney's just barely visible on stage, giving a speech after one of his three trophies that night.)
Every now and then, a particularly cruel comment will flit across his feed, and with the secrecy of having a secret account- a fanpage about the Fairy Penguin breed (which he thought was delightfully ironic, since they were named Little Penguins) he was free to kick up a small, scathing storm of words.
Some nights, he still wakes up in a cold sweat, thinking of bashed-in faces and dulled eyes. When he's at home, sometimes he'll lie awake to the sound of her breathing, pressing his thumb against her pulse point. If he's away, he'll stare at their synced watches, watching as her heart rate steadily coasts through the night.
He can’t bring himself to look at barrels, or watch zombie movies, without his stomach churning. A small, obsessive part of him thrums rapidly whenever she stays behind on a roadie, however many hours away. He can’t help the slow mounting panic that fills his stomach whenever he thinks about it too hard, that somewhere in Pittsburgh, in the same city his daughter slept, someone had wanted her dead.
(Going to the cops had been a useless affair. It had enraged him so badly he had to step out at certain points, forced to listen to them tell him that there was nothing they could do. Keep an eye on her, they said, come back if it gets worse. He didn’t think it could get much worse than stalking and corpse-ifying his daughter.)
Even now, as she sleeps in the bed next to his, in a fancy hotel in the middle of New York, he can’t help but watch the slight rising and falling of the blankets. Maybe, someday, the paranoia will leave him. But for now, he keeps an eye out for signs of life.