microbiologist1 replied to your post “airilymusing replied to your post “The Goaltender’s Mate” ...”
I've only just discovered this entire storyline and I cant tell you how much I love it. It looks like you have already moved on from this but I was wondering how you thought Ritter would respond if he saw Elias being much happier but then discovering it was because he had moved on. Maybe a fellow Swede (Markstrom???) was looking after him. Would Ritter be happy and be able to move on too or would he be jealous and nest/pine again?
Oh man it’s been a minute since I thought about Ritter and Elias.
Elias is definitely done with dating goalies, or goalies in general, wants no part of them or their weird instinctual bullshit. If he was ever around a nesting goalie again he’d do his damnedest to be literally anywhere else. Nobody would have to worry about him getting too close because he’s booking it out of there.
Ritter was never consciously jealous. When he’s his normal self, he’s not interested in Elias. It’s part of why they broke up. Elias seems appealing when Ritter is coming off a nest and his hormones are out of whack, but once he’s settled back to normal he’s just not into Elias anymore (not the way he’s into Matty). The problem is that he’s subconsciously extremely into Elias and his goalie instincts cannot possibly fathom how he could ever want somebody else. So it’s kind of implied that Elias has no reason to expect that if he stays with the Flames, this pattern would continue of Ritter nesting, forcing Elias to nest with him, coming out of nesting him and dropping him for Matty until his subconscious got upset that Elias wasn’t around and forced him to nest again.
And Elias wants no part in it, and it’s super disruptive for the team, which is why the only solution I could ever really see would be Elias asking for a trade, and the team would grant it because they figure if Elias is entirely out of the picture then their starting goalie would stop being incapacitated and screwing up the whole team dynamic.