SOTW: Willy, bb Lee Barton, bb Scouts; this’ll start and end in tears (pt 1)
From an obliging anon: baby trigger????
Show of hands, who’s surprised this sprung multiple parts?
“Who pissed off a witch?” Tate yells.
An entire locker room stares back at him, then at least half of them burst into tears.
Tate bets it’s him. He bets he pissed off a witch. Because there is no other reason for him to be facing down a classroom’s worth of small children, still decidedly adult. The only adult. God help him.
Tate’s decent enough with children, but that’s when he’s chatting with them for a couple minutes not — this.
“Stop crying!” Tate says, but his ‘I am the leader of this locker room and your captain as soon as they quit this interim A shit’ voice, which typically works extremely well on this group, does not work when they are small children. The crying child number has increased. Tate feels like a monster.
Tate calls Coach. Coach has kids. Coach is a coach. Those are two things that make him far more qualified for this situation than Tate is.
“Oh no,” Coach says. “No, this is not my job.”
“And it’s mine?” Tate says. Someone’s tugging on his pants. He very gently disentangles their fingers before he gets pantsed, because the tugging is insistent and it is strong. Green eyes look up at him, which narrows things down significantly, as does the familiar determined expression on this child’s face. Usually Tate sees it from a distance, and from behind a mask, but he also sees it every single shooting practice, so.
“Limbo?” Tate asks. “Is that you?”
“I’m hungry,” the small child says.
“They’re hungry,” Tate tells Coach.
“Give me twenty,” Coach says, sounding very tired.
“Bring help,” Tate tells him, then calls PR to ask for a dozen pizzas. That’s not in their job description either, but Charity is very understanding when Tate tells her he has two dozen kids on his hands, albeit confused, like she’s wondering if she forgot a children’s event.
He’d tell her, but someone’s started throwing equipment, so Tate thinks his attention needs to be on the kids when they’re in the midst of a bunch of shit they could hurt themselves with. Skate blades are sharp. This room is not child proof at all.
Someone’s crying again. Tate should not be surprised even a little, considering the personalities in this room. Frankly he should be surprised they aren’t all crying right now, but they seem to enjoy producing chaos too much to be upset, which is — unsurprising. Extremely unsurprising.
Tate follows the crying to a cluster of little buddies. Scratch is instantly recognizable, hair a riot of curls, and magical process of deduction means the floofy haired kid practically clinging to him is Money and the bawling child is — wait, is that Trigger?
“Okay, what happened?” Tate says.
Scratch and Money and Trigger all start talking over one another, Trigger with tear-streaked cheeks.
“Lee?” Tate says. “Buddy, what’s the matter?”
“I was trying to tell Scratch a st-st-story,” Trigger bawls. “But Money won’t le-le-let me.”
“It was a stupid—“ Money starts.
“Money,” Tate says. “Why don’t you and Scratch go get some chocolate from the player’s lounge.”
“I don’t like chocolate,” Money announces. His voice is higher than usual, but the smugness as he says it is the exact same.
Even as a child? Even as a child he didn’t like chocolate?
“There’s crackers and stuff too,” Tate says. “Juice?”
Crackers and juice are apparently acceptable to Little Money. Pocket Change. If they stick that way that’s his new nickname.
They will not stick this way. They have hockey to play.
“Why don’t you tell me the story,” Tate says to Trigger as Money drags Scratch to the player’s lounge, Scratch looking back a few times with big brown eyes. He’s the cutest kid, Tate swears. No wonder he got away with absolutely everything growing up, by his own admission.
Trigger gives him a suspicious look, which is the most Trigger thing Tate’s glimpsed in him. He was starting to think he’d been replaced by an impostor.
“You’ll listen?” he asks quietly. “To the whole thing?”
“To the whole thing,” Tate assures him. “Come sit down.”
Trigger takes the stall beside him, then, after a moment of hesitation, plasters himself against Tate like a koala. The story is admittedly a bit of a rambly, hard to parse one — Tate thinks it’s about zombies? Or flesh eating plants? Or flesh eating zombie plants?
Coach walks in the door.
“Coach!” Tate cries out with relief, and notices he’s not the only one.
After some quizzing from Tate and Coach — with an interruption for pizza that devolves into a bit of a nightmare — it’s established that the kids all have their memories, albeit in a strange way. Tate imagines it’s hard to understand adult memories in the framework of a child’s brain, but the guys know each other and they know him, and they, thank fuck, seem to retain their memories of Coach being an authority figure, because they’re obedient with him. Or at least more obedient than they are with anyone else.
Coach gets Tate calling next-of-kin to come to the arena, tells him not to bother explaining — and he doesn’t need to, the ‘just come’ gets people there in no time flat — because they’d be skeptical, but skepticism’s hard when you’re faced with a child-sized version of your significant other.
Most of them go home with their wives and girlfriends taking care of them until they get a cursebreaker on things. The SOs seem to land in camps of extremely bemused or utterly smitten — the ones who are moms just look resigned to having another kid to look after for the foreseeable future — and some are taking two little Scouts home, so the single dudes have someone looking after them. Coach takes the rookies home himself, seeming to feel obligated to care for them.
Scratch and Money belong to one another and refuse to be separated, and Lee’s been stuck to Tate like glue since Tate listened to his story, so without his meaning to Tate’s ends up with three kids in the back of his car, driving home. Well, Money’s car. Tate’s car isn’t really meant for carting children around.
“I’m hungry,” Money pipes up.
“You just had pizza,” Tate says.
“I’m hungry too,” Scratch says.
Well, that’s eminently unsurprising.
“Me too,” Trigger says, soft.
“Okay, who wants McDonald’s?” Tate says, and gets two cheers and some grumbling from Money when he pulls into the drive-thru.