#tkabin

[crosbyism]

read on ao3

[crosbyism]

tkabin pls??? 👀

thanks for the ask! ☺️ (from this ask game)

tkabin is a platonic sibling dynamics cabin fic, mostly about heavy sibling feelings re: what happens if coming out to them doesn’t go so well. brady basically takes matthew to a cabin for the weekend post 2023 playoffs, where they’re stuck with each other for a bit. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s not like Matthew wasn’t expecting something to go wrong when he planned it around the bye week. A late birthday present; he was gifting himself as much of an honest life as he feasibly could for his twenty-fifth. 

He knew, long-term, the culprit wasn’t going to be his father, who always put family first and would do so no matter what, even if he was the man Matthew had first heard the word faggot from. Taryn was unquestionably going to be fine too, with her lesbian best friend. Matthew was actually most nervous about his mother, who could’ve gone either way. It wasn’t unfounded, but two months after coming out she made a point to turn to Matthew at the tail end of a family video call about Taryn’s recent breakup and ask: well, is there a nice man who’s caught your eye recently? and that was that.

At the time, Brady didn’t even occur to him. They were so deep under each other’s skin that it was unthinkable for Matthew to anticipate anything less than unconditional support; anything else would be an insult and deservedly get him his ass beat. If he even thought about it at all in advance, he thought Brady wouldn’t even be surprised, that it would just be an unspoken truth to him the way things are between two people who love each other best in the world. The same way Taryn wasn’t all-too surprised, punching him in the arm and rolling her eyes and hugging him and saying okay, love you. If I set you up, you gotta buy me beer for a whole season.

But Brady had laughed like it was a joke, and then Brady’d said, no you’re not. c’mon, you’ve never been like that, and then Brady’d gotten upset and said but wouldn’t it be easier if—

And then Brady hadn’t talked to him for five months. 

Matthew had dragged himself through the end of the season and into the playoffs, plunging himself into hockey so he wouldn’t have to think about the lonely future in front of him where his brother and him never spoke again. Worse: where the only things they said to each other were plated next to the Thanksgiving turkey, stiltedly poked at with forks and knives before they stuffed the leftovers of their relationship in tiny boxes to take home and enjoy for another half-week before they went back to not talking at all. 

[crosbyism]

Trick or Treat!!

This is an excerpt I really like from a current WIP about the tkachuk siblings that i havent talked about much yet. the working title is called “tkabin”:

Johnny asked him once, what it was like to have siblings. He didn’t ask it like he wanted to know something about Matthew; he said it by the wayside, the type of drive-by that always scratched up Matthew more than he let on: isn’t it exhausting with so many of you? And Matthew had rolled his eyes, and said: it’s awesome, actually. At the time, he hadn’t known how to say: it’s like having part of you live outside your body. Or: it’s like a phantom limb that pisses you off every chance it gets. Or: if I ever hit my head so hard I wouldn’t remember anything else, I’d remember Brady and Taryn. It’s hard to explain how that kind of love will only die once they’re in the grave. Even then, there’s a part of Matthew that knows it’ll sink into the soil where they’re buried, feed the worms and the roots of trees and sprout in the new leaves stretching toward the sky. Somewhere in the world, no matter how far apart, a hundred years from now there’ll be three trees with three new leaves reaching for the sun, remembering what it’s like to never really have to be alone.