#malcom spence

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i hope you do eventually write a fic about sam and misa surviving on an island no pressure though 🤨mb i'll use this emoji when i message to bug you about it again haha

ps i'm still stuck on misa graveyard full of dead friends thing. youth hockey caught red-handed

eyebrow emoji anon!! i'm blushing!!! nobody's ever assigned themselves an emoji in my inbox before!! this is so exciting!!

and (taking a big breath here, exhaling, inhaling again) i've also still been thinking about michael misa walking around in his graveyard of dead friends. he’s kinda like the groundskeeper if i think about it too hard, the weird kind who sometimes ignores the bones rattling, and then sometimes digs people up and stares them right in their dead faces and sometimes even checks them into the boards. and it’s not like michael killed them himself. like you said, it’s just the scythe of youth hockey, pulling more and more childhood buddies beyond the veil.

most of the guys still exist in his phone, and they post their end of season highlights, which mis likes and moves on from. memorials, he thinks. some of them send texts that make it through the fog, usually in april, because they play on chronically bottom 8 teams. they say “bro we gotta catch up" and they probably mean it and mike also means it, if he remembers to text back. and this is all possible because they aren’t really dead, they’re in michigan and philly and ugh, calgary.

despite all this grief, misa doesn’t have abandonment issues. not anymore at least. hardly hurts to see these guys when they pop their heads outta the dirt because misa has his routines, and if you're not in them, you're not really... y'know. he’s usually got one guy at a time, is all. one guy who drives him around, who knows how to make his favorite smoothie, who texts him from the other bed in the hotel room instead of saying the weird thing out loud. and then hockey does what it does, takes the person and keeps the hole they left.

i have to talk about malcom spence. and i'm sorry for that. @castratecapuchin said it best with "malcom spence is the the dead body of all time."

the hole is undoubtedly spence shaped.

spence who knew mike when he was just some kid with a bauer duffle bag bigger than his body.

who liked when mike would rattle off stats to him and show off his hockey card collection.

who mike made out with when making out didn’t even have a name yet.

who knew he was never quite as good, never quite as accurate as misa but called him his best friend anyway.

who misa described as the best player (in the series between saginaw and the otters, 2025 ohl postseason.)

who felt like the world was ending when he got drafted early in the 2nd round to the rangers and misa went 2nd ova to the sharks. who couldn't even celebrate that night, went straight back to his hotel room. went to umich with the hopes that one day he'd be an nhler too.

zayne is different, obviously. he's still there, like a statue at the end of a dark hallway that mike could find, even with his eyes covered. i haven't thought too hard about this one but i will if someone puts a gun to my head.

i don't think about mistone very often because porter martone isn't dead at all, he texts misa at 11:30pm whenever the sharks play the flyers, and randomly throughout the summer, only at night time though. u up? misa ignores it, has better dick on speed dial. sometimes he sends marty pictures of sam, probably sam, dark buzzed hair, between his thighs and marty gets bricked up but refuses to reply. not because he's mad misa's fucking a knight, he'd Very Obviously cross that line too. he's just jealous, gotta find something vaugely misa-like to jerk off to. (i'm sorry if anyone was harmed by my characterization of porter martone. i don't know what to tell you)

don't ask me about how william eklund fits into all this. i'm not ready to talk about it. come back in a few months.

sam isn't a replacement for some dead friend. he's the final girl, impossible to bury. he makes himself big and fits into that spence shaped hole, stretches it even, makes room for himself to get comfy. force of nature. guy who gets kicked out of the london knights group chat enough to know everything is temporary until you decide that it isn't. he fucks with michael's schedule and then somehow becomes the schedule. keeps coming back loud and alive and irritating. it feels like every time mike tries to turn him into a future memory, sam is already there in the present tense going, “what's wrong with your face? did you take your vitamins? eat something.”

god. i'm sorry about this. i hope you come back sometime, eyebrow anon.

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thinking about all the places malcom spence has been and how none of them are madison square garden.

malcolm’s in the hotel bar, in sweden. highlights from their win v germany are playing on every screen, even though everybody in the room has spent all day, all week, looking at hockey, which feels like overkill, but nobody in hockey knows when to stop. malcom’s whole life, he’s never stopped.

he and mike are splitting fries, their knees knocking under a table too small for either of them. malcolm’s been mike’s road roommate since before either of them had anything worth asking about, back when he showed up to the sens with a broken wrist and mike made room for him without saying a thing. after that, it was basically years of arriving together: same minor hockey rooms, same canada gear, first and second in the ohl draft. mike first, malcolm right after, close enough that it felt like the same sentence. people keep stopping at the table to talk to mike, and malcolm gets pulled into the pictures because he’s already sitting there. he doesn’t mind it yet. at seventeen, he still thinks being beside someone when they get there means you got there too.

malcolm’s in the locker room, in erie. the speakers are clipping because the otters have just scored nine and are up three-one on saginaw, and everybody’s throwing their gloves in the air and yelling like the series is already over. two nights from now they’ll finish it in saginaw, four games to one, erie’s first series win since 2017. malcolm has already scored twice in game one and dragged game three into overtime with thirteen seconds left, which should make this feel good and uncomplicated. for once, schaef is in street clothes, mike is on the wrong side, and malcolm is the one still moving forward. except every question after the game is about what it means to do this against misa, the scoring champ, the probable top-two pick, his buddy since they were kids.

malcolm knows exactly what mike’s face looks like when he thinks he’s failed everybody. he wants to text sorry, which would be insulting, or four-one 😉, which would at least be honest. he settles on you good? and stares at the screen until the room has gone quiet around him.

malcolm’s in liminal space, in buffalo. some guy is measuring his wingspan: six-foot-six, which is pretty cool, he guesses. the combine is everything awful packed into one hellish week, though, just guys touching you and saying weird shit, as if the arch of your foot or the forward flex of your thumb is something you can control. he’s basically absent at the jump station, mostly thinking about misa and schaefer — his buddies, but also the two guys everyone expects to go first and second at the draft.

even though he’s rooming with mike, it feels like they’ve hardly seen each other at all, since mike’s always being herded away to do some press thing. that’s not anything to be greedy about, malcolm knows; there’s nothing fun about it aside from the knowledge of what’ll come after. still, it’s a kick in the shin that nobody’s really asking him anything, except for some weird question about which kitchen utensil he’d reach for during the zombie apocalypse. he wonders, bitter and trying not to show it, if that’s really the kind of information they need to figure out whether he’d be good on the team.

malcolm’s in his hotel room, in la. he’s spent six hours sitting straight up in his chair, tie annoyingly tight around his neck, and still nobody’s called his name. his world is ending, but schaef went first and mike went second, exactly like everybody said they would. malcolm stood up for both of them, hugged them, smiled for the pictures, and meant every bit of it, which was probably the hardest part. there wasn’t anyone useful to be angry at.

after that, the names kept coming until all thirty-two were gone, each one another piece of proof that somebody had looked at malcom and decided not yet. his family keeps saying tomorrow like it’s comforting. his phone is full of people telling him they’re proud, which has started to sound suspiciously like they knew this would happen. proud of him for what? not walking into the sea and never returning?

it’s fucked, because malcom should be out celebrating with the boys, but he can’t, because it feels impossible to shape his face into something that can be seen in public. tomorrow, he’ll have to do it, so that the rangers can take him forty-third, their first pick. he’ll smile, say he’s gonna produce because of that chip on his shoulder, lie about how it doesn’t feel like a consolation prize. but tonight, he just fucking can’t. tonight, the chip is more like an open wound that’s bleeding all over the bedsheets.

malcolm’s in his dorm room, in michigan. his academic portal says undeclared in a way that confirms he never meant to be here. hockey is going well — really well, technically. a big ten title, a frozen four run, good minutes, good points, good college puck. good, he’s learning, is another word people use when they mean not yet. he’s just finished doing a zoom interview with schaef, his buddy, his old roommate, first overall, already on the islanders, who says he hates losing and is looking forward to beating the rangers every time they play. malcolm laughs because it is objectively funny, and because the camera is still on, and because schaef would chirp him into the ground if he knew it landed any other way.

after he'd hung up, the room was too fucking quiet except for the mini-fridge whirring and some kid yelling in the hall. malcolm has a half-finished history 101 discussion post open beside a text from rangers development. mike and schaef have both become proof that the whole thing, the whole of his childhood spent on the ice, gets you where you want to go.

malcolm is still waiting to find out whether he'll get to go too.