A Forest Growing Out of Spite for You Specifically
This was written entirely because @swedishgoaliemafia wanted more Teddy Bear Picnic. For reference, read her tag or my tag or try to psychically divine our extensive chat logs. Good luck!
GRIEF
Joe is traded. It is an ungodly shitshow from start to finish, in the locker room and in the media.
The Sharks take him from rain and snow and fly him home. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, in a land of warm weather and undying foliage. He wants a proper winter, screaming wind and barren trees; something to justify the way he wants to stay in bed forever.
DENIAL
There’s a tree in the parking lot when Joe leaves the game. He doesn’t mean that there’s a tree next to the parking lot. He means he walks out of the rink, the last man headed home, and almost breaks his nose on a tree trunk.
It’s a full goddamn redwood, through the asphalt and up straight to the dark sky.
“Nope,” Joe says. To himself? To the tree? To whatever fucking shit was in the supplements that the training staff had given him? He sidesteps it and goes directly to his car. When he checks his rear view mirror, there’s no tree at all. Which is correct, but he can’t shake the feeling that he should check over his shoulder.
He goes home. He doesn’t say anything. It’s hard enough to be traded across the country without talking to teammates or coaches about tree hallucinations.
ANGER
Joe leaves the rink after the game, one of the first guys done. The win was good, but he did literally nothing worth media time.
The tree is back. It seems bigger somehow. Broader, maybe, like it’s blocking out light and sound. A man steps out from behind the tree. Joe could not remember what he looked like if his life depended on it. He just remembers those eyes, so pale in the darkness. The man steps back, but his hand is outstretched and Joe can feel a little voice telling him to follow. He shakes his head, trying to clear his vision.
There is no tree. Joe’s eyes almost burn under the streetlights, startled by the absence of a leafy canopy.
“Fuck!” He kicks some loose pebbles. There’s a pressing sense that that was the wrong thing to do, some cosmic disapproval, but he doesn’t give a damn. “Fuck off!”
He spins around, ready to scream, and then notices Patrick Marleau. He’s standing in the doorway, one eyebrow quirked as he watches Joe presumably have a tantrum for no reason. Joe shuts his mouth. He stomps off to his car and thinks absolutely no thoughts about how his teammates probably think Boston was right about him; instead he conjures up a fantasy about getting a lighter and setting the hallucinatory trees on fire. It sustains him the entire drive home.
BARGAINING
There are two trees in the parking lot when Joe parks at practice. A neat V growing right behind his damn car, hemming him into his parking spot between Goc and Clowe.
“Go away,” he whispers, eyes closed tightly. He promises whatever higher entity is haunting him with trees that he’ll be good. He’ll make friends with his teammates and he’ll hustle on the puck and he’ll—
Shit his fucking pants because the man is knocking on his car window, pale eyes wide.
The man mouths something and Joe concedes to rolling his window down just a crack. No need to antagonize the lunatic further, whether he’s a hallucination or not.
“Come with me,” the man says softly, in a voice like the wind through spring leaves.
“Uh, no.” Joe can’t stop the eye contact. There’s something compelling in those eyes, like fresh ice waiting to be skated on.
The man trails his fingers over the edge of the window and Joe has the sudden urge to shut it tight. Curling vines drip into his car, sprouting orange and yellow flowers. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Listen, I have to get to practice. If you let me go, I’ll come back and we can talk later.”
The man tilts his head, strangely bird-like. “Come with me.”
“No, really, I have to go.”
The man’s eyes shift, his form only loosely approximating a person and then there’s the sharp noise of Hanny’s obnoxiously loud engine roaring into the lot and the trees are gone. One flower falls from the bare window edge, into Joe’s lap. He leaves it in the dirt by the rink entrance, unwilling to bring it with him. It’s gone when he returns.
DEPRESSION
It’s getting to be a routine. Joe goes somewhere alone, finds some real asshole of a plant (usually a tree, but sometimes a particularly douchey fern) lurking in his way.
His teammates must think he’s the clingiest fool on this earth, but the trees leave him alone in groups. He’s aware that he’s sounding increasingly neurotic in his conversations with himself, but what is he supposed to do? Ask a trainer if a few too many concussions leads to a weird preoccupation with ghost trees?
Getting angry didn’t get rid of the trees. Accepting the trees somehow made more of them. His last refuge is pretending he doesn’t see them.
Somehow as spring approaches in San Jose, his ghost trees don’t just sprout leaves, they sprout little woodpeckers and unnaturally charming squirrels. Joe knows better than to trust normal birds and rodents and he certainly isn’t going out of his way to acknowledge fake ones.
He’s starting to wonder if there’s something really wrong with his brain. Will they make him stop playing hockey? On the ice he never hallucinates, but coming and going from the rink is increasingly fraught.
He doesn’t know what the trees want, but he knows that if he follows those little bastards, he’ll be leaving hockey behind. He’s finally doing well again, connecting with his lineys and trusting the system. He can’t afford to lose it all for some dubious plants.
The very sight of normal plants is starting to fill him with despair. It just feels inevitable. Real or not, those plants will get him.
ACCEPTANCE
Joe’s trying very hard not to arrive to early or too late. The middle of the pack is where it’s safe. He times it pretty well usually, following Cheech or Crankshaft.
He’s humming along, heading out on time from practice, planning on lunch at home before a good pregame nap. He opens the door haphazardly and it bounces off the wall and right back into his unresisting arm.
There’s a strange fog over the parking lot, shrouding the trees by the road so well that Joe can’t even tell of those trees are real or not. It’s not like the fog that rolls in from the Bay at night, some soft blanket from the sea. This is heavy, smothering.
He wades in anyway. No other recourse if he wants to reach his car. It’s not hard going, but it is disorienting. He wonders if this is his brain completely giving up. Is he going to walk into traffic, thinking he’s in a sea of fog?
He reaches a thinner area, almost like sunshine is breaking through. A few feet away, he can see Nabby, gazing at the gnarled roots of the trees as he steps forward lightly and he knows he only has one shot. He drops his gear and runs to grab Nabby and wrestle him away, pulling him out as best as he can. It takes too long to find the sidewalk and Joe feels like he’s being toyed with, taunted in the fog. He keeps his eyes open, pushing forward without hesitation.
The moment they clear the fog and step into the midmorning sun, Nabby blinks and says something softly in Russian. He sits down hard on the curb, catching himself with a hand just above Joe’s knee.
“Nabby?” Joe crouches down, puts a careful hand on Nabby’s shoulder.
“What was that?”
“You can see it too?” Joe breathes.
“The trees,” Nabby says almost dreamily. “They’re waiting.”
“No,” Joe says emphatically, shaking Nabby until his eyes clear. “Stay out of the woods. Don’t go into the woods.”
“The woods...” Nabby trails off, looking over Joe’s shoulder, startled. Joe turns. There’s nothing anymore. Joe’s bag is in the middle of the parking lot, looking almost lonely.
Something about that sight gives him clarity. He helps Nabby up and retrieves his bag.
This is why he’s here. This is why he was traded. He can see the woods, but he can walk away. Maybe that’s a better skill than he thought. It’s up to him to keep the woods from hurting his team now.
On this fine day, Gavin has gifted us with some old school nostalgia
“Think I was talking recently on Off Topic about how I recorded us doing all the original lets play intros that used to play at the beginning of our videos. I found them in the old vault from 2013. They weren’t all winners.
