#I needed to practice muscles and I wanted to draw a beefy Omega

[the-theshiro-123]

Terzo and Omega!

Sorry for the lack of Ghost content, I was busy working on my webcomic

(alt version down below)

[beggingwolf]

omg I would love for you to break down that scene from TKK where sid goes into heat unexpectedly and geno rescues him from the Czech alphas!! (yes I have read and reread it a million times bc it is absolutely delicious.) (also this is jes @ticklefighthockey - can’t send from my hockey sideblog!)

hi jes!! thank you so much for asking!! I love that scene too

this is, uh, a behemoth. be warned: 

He’s being led on a tour of the rink, after the Russians have embarrassingly lost to Finland and before the Canadians are set to battle with the Czechs, when Zhenya stumbles upon him. 

I enjoy, in retrospect, how Zhenya and Sid’s emotional states are so different coming into this interaction. Even going back further than this specific day, Zhenya-in-Helsinki is bored and understimulated and out of his area of expertise and his alphaness is chafing at him. Meanwhile, Sid is overstimulated and anxious and fearful and in denial about/trying to hide his omeganess. Their designations are really on display here: Zhenya is brashly an alpha, Sid is shamefully an omega, and I Just Think That’s Delicious. 

It’s a flash, something deep and slumbering in his brain that alights like gas touched by a flame. One moment he’s listening to a very calm scout for the Superleague talk to him about Ovechkin and the potential a future Team Russia has, and the next there are yells echoing off the hallway’s walls and a figure racing towards them. A hook nestles into Zhenya’s intestines and his long leg moves, jerked along with the rest of him as he trips the running blur. 

The omega falls; Zhenya reaches for them, and before Zhenya can stop himself, his big hand grabs the omega by the back of their neck. The omega seizes up, and Zhenya can’t breathe as his grip tightens and then shakes. 

This is the, like, one part of the fic where Zhenya’s alphaness overwhelms him in the same way Sid’s omeganess overwhelms him. Sid is repeatedly at the mercy of his biology in the fic, and though he works to overcome it (and eventually settle into it), Zhenya doesn’t share that struggle—except for in this moment. I like how it equalizes them for a fraction of a second. Immediately after, the power imbalance flares to life and they’re on unequal ground, but for this moment, they’re both at the mercy of their bodies. It’s a huge aspect of what I enjoy about a/b/o.

Sid likes Helsinki. 

I love this jump cut, personally. I think it’s cheeky of me and fun and, after hooking the reader with Zhenya’s side of things, allows me to do what I enjoy most: babble on about juniors!Sid. Let’s fast forward to where the narrative catches up with Zhenya’s POV:

Sid is last out of the showers after practice. He doesn’t normally linger, but he had spent so long staring at how Carter’s traps and deltoids flexed as he washed his hair that he stalled and told everyone he’d catch up.

Sid’s discomfort with his designation almost takes precedence over his relationship with his sexuality in TKK. They’re inextricably intertwined, but Sid really spends more time thinking about being an omega than he does fantasizing about alphas—perhaps largely in part due to his first ~meaningful~ physical interaction with alphas ends up being a near-assault followed by a formative, if unhealthy, scruffing at the hands of Zhenya. I hope I put in enough to show that Sid is eyeing the alphas around him with intent and that it’s disrupting his routines. Builds the tension. Primes us for what’s about to happen. 

“Get out of there soon, Crosby, the Czechs are going to need the locker room in ten!” Durocher had called out to him, and Sid had made a sound of acknowledgement.

He’s not proud to jerk off in the empty communal showers. Once he’s come, he desperately tries to forget the fantasy of being shoved up against the cold tile, the slickness between his thighs being put to good use. His cheeks are flaming red and he’s mortified at himself as he washes the evidence off of his hands. In a rush he towels himself off and gets dressed in his team sweats, grabbing his bag of gear and jogging for the doors. 

Yeah I’d be mortified too, Sid.

He opens the door and runs face-first into a chest.

He chokes on his own spit as he smells it, the sharp, overwhelming scent of alphas, plural, and looks up at the huge Czech defensemen that he’s spent two afternoons watching tape on. 

The big one he ran into looks at Sid with vibrant blue eyes, and Sid stills as he watches the guy’s nostrils flare with a big intake of breath.

Sid forgot the cologne. 

“Crosby,” the alpha says, his accent strangely shaping Sid’s name. Sid heard plenty of Czech at the U18 tourney, when Canada had gone down against the Czech team and the players and their fans had drunkenly gathered outside of the Canadian locker room to howl shit at them until the Canadians muscled their way out.

He’s never heard anything like the way this enormous alpha drawls his name, and his eyes go wide. 

The alpha next to the blue-eyed one, a beefy blond guy that has a huge nose, takes a step towards Sid and says something. Sid can’t understand the words, but the message behind them is clearer than fresh ice in the winter, and all Sid can think is that he’s never been in this much danger. 

Some disgusting, traitorous part of him whispers in his ear that maybe he’d like it if he stayed and listened to what they had to say.

Sid runs. 

Sid’s sexual immaturity is really on display here. I don’t say anything about what the alphas smell like, and though Sid catalogues what the alphas look like (this was mostly so I could make them distinct in their actions), none of it is appreciative.

He’s a prey animal realizing he’s in danger, and regardless of his fantasies and recent jerk-off session, he has almost no desire to “be an omega” in this moment… except for the part of himself he hates, the part of himself he isn’t at ease with yet. EVEN THEN, he’s not interested in, like, being thrown to the ground and Taken in the biblical sense, but he’s interested in “if he stayed and listened to what they had to say.”

It’s that teasing at wanting something, that teenage impulse to want to explore what you’re feeling but not willing to go all the way because you’re afraid and unsure and still young! But his prey instinct wins out (smartly).

He hates himself for it; he’s a fighter, and he doesn’t run from boys who are bigger than him, but he knows as deeply and intrinsically as he knows his own name that the instant one of the Czech alphas gets their hands around his neck, he’s done for.

That first line could be interpreted 2 ways before you get past the semi-colon: does he hate himself for running because he wants the Czechs? No; it’s because he wants to fight. Sid’s incorrectly performing being an omega here in multiple senses: he’s running from alphas and wanting to avoid his heat, and he’s also wanting to fight them.

He drops low, bending his legs so he can ram his shoulder into the blue-eyed one’s stomach, shoving him back just enough so Sid can elbow past the blond alpha and push through. He feels the blond reach for him, and a shout builds in his throat as the boy’s big hand grazes Sid’s wrist, nearly gripping him before Sid can twist out of the way. 

He takes a step before the strap across his body gets yanked back, and Sid chokes as it digs into his Adam’s apple. The Czechs are gripping onto his hockey bag, and Sid only hesitates long enough for a hand to snake up and reach for his damp hair before he grits his teeth and slips out from under the strap of his bag and leaves it behind him, running in his untied sneakers down the hall.

The mention of his Adam’s apple draws attention to Sid’s age, I feel. It shows he’s physically mature but BARELY, because pointing it out draws attention to it in a conspicuous way. Then Sid being willing to ditch his hockey gear as he sprints—well, it shows (for once) he has his priorities straight. He tried to keep his omeganess hidden for the sake of hockey. Now he has to abandon hockey to keep himself safe. 

The Czechs yell, their voices loud and reverberating off of the walls in a way that feels like it can physically pummel Sid. He still has the scent of them in his nose, and he can feel his untrustworthy body responding. He runs blindly, as fast as he can.

HERE we get some sense that the alphas are having a physical impact on Sid. And yet it’s not eroticized at all. It’s made violent and scary and he’s stripped of his own senses. 

He rounds a corner and sprints, not remembering which way is which in the Helsinki rink. Sid barrels towards two figures in the hall, and his overwhelmed senses can tell that one of them is an alpha, the tall one, the dark one, and he sucks in one last desperate breath to hold so he can sprint past, so he can just get away from the heady scent and go somewhere safe.

Tall and dark, eh, Sidney? Our first hint of romantic descriptors. 

The tall alpha moves faster than lightning, faster than a goalie adjusting to block a shot, and Sid feels an ankle connect with his shin and he panics. 

Sid makes it about hockey. Ok bud sure you do you. (But like for real this represents a connection back to something Sid knows, something that is safe[...ish] for Sid, something that he loves).

He tripped him. The alpha tripped him, and maybe he’s in on it, and maybe Sid’s mom was right to be paranoid for all these years, and Sid’s hands come up to brace for the impact of the carpet when a hand as big as the span of his entire neck comes down on the back of it. 

Everything stops. 

Anxious stream-of-consciousness interrupted by an abrupt two-word sentence? Slap me silly with cliches, eh? But, hey, if it works...

The hand is enormous, the long, powerful fingers digging into the sides of Sid’s throat, and Sid’s jaw opens in something he hopes is a scream but by the way heat curls in his gut, he knows it’s something much, much worse.

Okay so HEREEEE we get yanked closer, again, to the erotic. The focus on hands (#TheFemaleGaze) as something salacious, enormous and long and powerful [hm. Freud is calling]... and even though Sid is terrified and refusing to put a specific name to what other emotion he’s feeling, his body betrays him yet again and we then fully slip into The Erotic with a heat—a heat—curling in his gut. 

The hand yanks him up, pulling him away from the floor, and Sid fights against the instinct to go limp with everything he has; his trained muscles seize up instead, and Sid has never been so grateful to be an athlete. He balls his fists, sliding his foot on the ground to try and right himself, and then his world ends when the alpha scruffs him.

Sid resorts to athleticism (his only other use for his body before Being An Omega fucked it up, according to him) in order to fight back. And then the line “and then his world ends” hits. Melodramatic, sure, but he’s 16.

And moreover, objectively, the world Sid knew before this interaction is indeed over for him. Zhenya later thinks in the fic that alphas and omegas feel fated, like something out of a fairytale, and that line of fate—that this was inevitable, that once Sid and Zhenya met, Sid would be lost to “normalcy,” does ring true by the time the fic ends.  

The alpha gives Sid a firm shake, just from the hand gripping his neck. Sid feels it down to his bones, reverberating through him harder than any check or hit he’s ever taken. Sid feels like he did when he was in 7th grade and one of his buddies tripped him while playing street hockey. This feels like when Sid’s head hit the blacktop; he’s not sure where all his limbs are anymore, and when he collapses, the alpha catches him.

This whole first chapter is just a major tease in regards to maturity, puberty, sexual awakenings, etc.

Sid acknowledged his physical response to alphas a few paragraphs ago, but now we’re back to Sid: The Child, to his middle-school self who is hurt and injured and vulnerable. By scruffing him, Zhenya ironically reverts him back to his child self; had Zhenya not scruffed him, who knows what Sid might have done or said to an alpha he was attracted to while he slips into heat?

By scruffing Sid—by making him no longer a viable partner [according to Zhenya’s instincts/hindbrain]—Zhenya actually keeps Sid safe here without even realizing it. 

Sid lets out a sigh that sounds pleased, and he wants to heave instead. 

And oop, we’re back! Tug and pull, back and forth. Will-they-won’t-they. Fun tension. The confusion of sexuality. Now that Sid is safe (even if he doesn’t know it), he can slip back into that pleasure state, even as he’s repulsed by it. 

The alpha says something. His voice is deep and rich. Sid’s head lolls back so he can catch a glimpse. 

He was right about the alpha being tall. His eyes go up and up to see the guy’s face. He’s older than Sid, but maybe he’s a player here. He could be 19, Sid hazily reasons to himself. His wide mouth is open in a concerned, surprised expression, and Sid’s eyes catch on how pink his lips are. He wonders how those lips would feel on his skin, but then his gaze is tugged upwards as the alpha’s eyebrows furrow over deep-set, dark eyes.

He’s handsome, and Sid is in his arms, utterly limp.

This part makes me smile even now while reading it :) Sid’s hazily like “Uhhh he could be my age right? Yeah it can definitely be acceptable to want this guy. Totally. Also he can totally play hockey. A dreamboat… Just For Me. Look at those lips. Also I’m totally helpless right now and for the FIRST time instead of terrified I am the human embodiment of the 👀 emoji.”

The alpha asks something of Sid, and Sid just stares up at him, dazed. He doesn’t know the language; it isn’t Czech. Maybe… Russian?

The hand still around his neck flexes, and Sid’s lips part. The alpha’s dark gaze drops to them, and Sid’s frightened by the emotion that blooms in his chest, a pride that’s twined with the adrenaline of his run. He can taste the alpha’s scent on his tongue, and it’s woodsy and deep and it makes Sid think of sex. He can feel his tongue poke at his lower lip, and the fingers around his neck tighten. 

Then the noises from down the hall get louder, and Sid can’t move to look, but the alpha’s head jerks up. Sid watches as the alpha’s lips curl back and he snarls loudly at the Czechs.

Sid can smell them, the way their scents slide from hunter to hunted. There are rude, ineffective words spat at Sid before they retreat. He doesn’t understand a whiff of it, though, and all he can do is watch the alpha clinging to him. The alpha bares his teeth at the Czechs even as they scamper away. Sid can see the alpha’s teeth aren’t fully straight, but they’re sharp and a swooping sensation bottoms out in Sid’s gut.

It’s nothing like Parise’s hit, nothing like Tambellini’s command to leave the ball alone. Sid stares up at his alpha and he knows that if this guy took him to the ground, Sid would roll over without a second thought. 

Fear rages through him again, even as his body hangs still from the scruffing.

Now we’re just really in the sauce, eh? We’ve fully entered into The Erotic and though Sid has that taste of fear in his chest, it’s not fear of alphas. It’s not fear of Zhenya.

It’s fear of himself. He isn’t scared at all of what Zhenya could do to him; he’s scared of what he wants (or what his body wants? He isn’t sure where that distinction is, because he’s been trying to divorce himself from his omega body since it started Making Problems).

Spicy! Delicious! I do, in fact, love it! His body is acting without his control (his tongue) but Sid is naming what he’s thinking of: sex. He hates himself over it. I am thoroughly enjoying myself!

The alpha looks back down at Sid, his lips coming together to cover his sharp teeth. He says something softly, glancing over Sid with obvious concern in his eyes. His grip loosens and his hand slides up into Sid’s wet hair to cradle his head instead. 

“Crosby,” Sid can hear the other man, the beta next to his alpha— the alpha say in surprise, and Sid’s chest tightens. 

“Crosby?” the alpha murmurs, squinting at Sid. He asks something else, and Sid still can’t get his throat to work, the scruffing clinging onto his voice box like a crushing fist. 

The beta says something and the alpha grimaces, but he gently starts lowering Sid to the floor. Sid gasps in a breath, because no, not in the middle of a hallway, but the alpha just lays Sid down, bracing a careful hand on Sid’s shoulder, still cupping the back of his skull as he crouches down next to him. 

“Crosby? Omega?” He hears the beta say in a thick Russian accent, and Sid’s eyes swivel to look at him. 

“Help,” Sid finally begs, feeling weak and shameful.

Here we actually lose some of the erotic tension because

1. Zhenya looks at Sid with concern, not lust

2. His grip loosens on Sid, and

3. Zhenya puts Sid down not to have his way with him, but to make sure he’s okay.

The power dynamic is starting to shift; it isn’t so much about a/b/o as it is age right here. Zhenya is taking care of this kid, as he notes in the next section, and since Sid’s hangups over his immaturity will haunt him in the fic, his perspective sort of neuters Zhenya here because he thinks their ages will be a barrier to Sid getting Zhenya.  

Also, another line I love: “no, not in the middle of a hallway,” because it’s SUCH a major slip on Sid’s part. His problem isn’t that he thinks Zhenya is about to go to town on him; it���s that they’re in a hallway and he has standards. (Or, rather, reasonable concerns over privacy, safety, and general comfort). 

“Who is Crosby?” Zhenya asks as he stares down at the omega he’s cradling. 

He’s about to be a very big thorn in your side for the next forever, Zhenya.

The omega is so young. He looks half-baked, especially with his head held at such an angle, making his chin disappear into his neck. His face is still round, and he has curly hair that hangs boyishly into his eyes. Those huge eyes are stunned and Zhenya can see the panic in them.

We’re still in that de-sexed space; readers can think “Hmm okay so maybe Sid was right, that Zhenya doesn’t really want-”

Zhenya closes his mouth and tries to take in less of the omega’s scent. It’s hot and jabs at Zhenya’s brain like a spice; Zhenya can smell the slick on him and swallows down the saliva flooding his mouth. 

“Oh.” 

Yep. Still wants ‘im. Has a moral compass to stop himself about it. Barely.

Also, Zhenya eats a fair amount of food in this fic—shitty food, like his McDonalds meal and bad American coffee, and good food, like the ribs and coco lardo in Moscow and the pelmeni and soup with his mother. Sid’s scent is like a spice to him—this appeals to his emotional senses, not just his physical ones. 

“This is Crosby,” the Superleague scout says, dumbfounded. “He plays for Canada, he’s an omega—”

“No shit,” Zhenya grunts, and he can’t stop his thumb from stroking across the kid’s shoulder where Zhenya is pinning him down, the thin Team Canada shirt shifting under his touch. “Crosby, who’s here with you?”

Oops, crack in the facade there, Zhenya. Watch your hands. Still, it’s not made clear if this is a gesture meant to be comforting (to Sid) or selfish (for Zhenya). Ambiguity!

The omega, Crosby, gapes up at Zhenya, and Zhenya curses himself for scruffing him. 

He hadn’t meant to; he’s only scruffed an omega once, and it was in a very different context, where a buxom omega named Svetlana had wanted Zhenya to lay her out and make her limp with it in bed. Crosby certainly hadn’t asked, but Zhenya had felt the panic in Crosby like a guillotine rising over his head and had needed to stop it. 

More cracks. Relating it to sex with Svetlana and then pulling himself back by a VERY sharp image of a guillotine. Feeling like you need to cut something off, there, Zhenya? 

His hindbrain had made the decision for him.

Zhenya thinks about alphaness in terms of his hindbrain—a hidden prey drive he’s got in his head, an old evolutionary instinct. Part of him, but... not all of him.

It’s very distinct from Sid, who refuses to even consider his omeganess as something other than, like, a personal failure and/or a physical impediment that’s fucking with him. When his omeganess comes for him, it takes him over.

Zhenya THINKS about his alphaness as divorced from himself to justify his actions; Sid ACTUALLY divorces his omeganess from himself as a survival instinct (until it stops working, and then until he figures out it’s more advantageous to work with it).

Crosby’s pulse still rabbits away. Zhenya swears he can feel it through Crosby’s scalp, and he says softly, “It’s okay, Crosby, I’m here to help you. I’ll help you.”

Rabbit :) Prey animal. Zhenya touching him carefully, not like a wolf chewing on its prey, but like a human soothing a scared animal.

He hears the Superleague scout say something in ugly English, and Zhenya frowns, wishing he had spent any time at all working on English like Viktor had asked him to. He only knows scraps he’d picked up from the ridiculous Americans the Magnitogorskaya bratva worked with. 

“He’s almost in heat,” he snaps at the scout. “Ask him about suppressants, does he have any?”

“His team should, they…” the scout starts, and he moves like he’s going to leave in search of the Canadians, but he hesitates. 

Zhenya watches the scout’s eyes rove over Zhenya’s long, powerful frame bent over the crumpled omega beneath him.

“He’s a child,” Zhenya bites out, even as his body tells him he’s an omega. “I won’t do anything. Get help. Now.”

:) Spicy!

He puts real force behind the words, and even though Crosby doesn’t appear to know Russian, he shakes under Zhenya’s hold. 

“Shh,” Zhenya murmurs, looking down at him. Those big amber eyes focus on Zhenya’s, and Zhenya’s hand on Crosby’s shoulder slides up to cup the side of his face.

“It’s okay,” Zhenya tells him, and he knows at least that in English. “Okay.”

Zhenya immediately comforting Sid even though he’s addressing the scout! We have not seen much of Zhenya being caring before this point; is this who Zhenya is? Is this what alphas do for omegas?

Truthfully it doesn’t matter because there’s no discord between Zhenya and his designation. He’s comfortable as an alpha. He is what he is, and no matter where it comes from, he comforts Sid in this moment.

Fuck the blonde women of Finland; Zhenya doesn’t want anything except the chubby-faced Canadian teenager he has laid out on the floor of a hockey rink, and since he can’t do anything about that, he needs to keep Crosby calm. 

“You’re going into heat,” Zhenya tells him, knowing Crosby can’t understand. “You’ve done this before, yes? You’re old enough to know. It’ll be okay, we’ll get you suppressants, you’ll make it through. It’ll be just fine.”

Zhenya: “I will rationalize this. Yes. I can do that. Sure. Great. I cannot let myself YEARN. But I’m definitely going to give him command-sounding reassurances that definitely aren’t any alpha impulses leaking out of me.” 

Zhenya’s eyebrows shoot up when Crosby moves a hand; it’s weak, but he manages to lift his arm enough to grip onto where Zhenya’s holding his face. It had taken Svetlana the better part of ten minutes to lift a finger, and he can see that Crosby, while young, is strong.

And, by the heat in his eyes, angry.

Zhenya grins at him, and he can feel Crosby’s pulse jump under his hands. 

“Don’t be angry, kitten,” Zhenya croons at him, unable to help himself. “I kept you safe, didn’t I? I’ll get you back to wherever you belong, yes?”

Zhenya, you flirt. Also he’s like “Cool I’ll call him Crosby I’ll be professional and—oh wait he’s pissed off and cute about it haha hi Kitten :) hi :) I’ll take care of youuu :)” 

Crosby recognizes the tone in his voice, if the way his eyes tighten is any indication. He opens his mouth to make a discontented sound that sends Zhenya into laughter. 

“Come,” Zhenya tells him between giggles. “You’re fine, let’s go find your team.”

When he scoops Crosby up off of the ground and into his arms, Crosby makes a sound so undignified it makes Zhenya lean against the wall to catch his breath.

Honestly I’m not happy with the emotional tone here and had I not been writing 50k words in a fugue state and needing to publish them by fest time I think I would’ve changed this. But alas! Its imperfections make it unique… or whatever. Hopefully someone likes it. 

Crosby is heavier than Zhenya expected; he’s dense, and Zhenya can glimpse how much of that density is dedicated to his ass. While Zhenya doesn’t lift weights with Metallurg anymore, he brawls enough to have very functional muscles. He can handle Crosby. He would like to handle him very, very much.

Yeah you do, Zhenya.