#arc: gongshow

[bobby-hockey]

CHERRY TREE

arc: gongshow (arc introduction here) tws: vehicle accident, death.  length: 2k. summary: in which i incontrovertibly hurt the capitals. also, sasha “ghost” molchalin gets an unwilling new roommate. taglist: @kidsarentallwrite

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Philadelphia Flyers @NHLFlyers - Nov. 4 They may be from Washington DC, but this is the City of Brotherly Love! Bring it on, Capitals! 

Philadelphia Flyers @NHLFlyers - Nov. 4 Mitty, Martin, and Molchalin start tonight. Retweet for a chance to win five gallons of Flyers-themed M&M(&M)s!

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Clarence Taylor. Even the mention of his name is enough to make Sasha break out in annoyed hives—no defenseman has ever been able to read Sasha like Taylor does, and it’s literally the most aggravating thing. Like—yes, okay, Taylor is the captain of the Washington Capitals, was the first overall pick in 2012, got the Calder his rookie year and the Norris last year, has been to the All-Stars more times than Sasha cares to count. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to jump on Taylor’s dick. The guy is fucking irritating. 

“Calm down,” Marty says during warm-ups, spotting the look on Sasha’s face when Taylor skates by with a snide little comment lobbed in Sasha’s direction. “I can see your blood pressure rising.” 

“He’s a bastard,” Sasha says. He wants to snap his stick in half and maybe use the pointy ends to commit a homicide. Marty’d scruff him like a little cat and Sasha wouldn’t get more than a few strides before his feet cartoonishly skated out from underneath him. But it’s the thought that counts.

“You’re giving him exactly the reaction he wants,” Marty says. “And you’re not special, Ghost, he does that to everyone.” 

Sasha does not snap his stick in half, but it takes a Herculean effort. “Don’t bother trying your hippie elementary school teacher horseshit on me,” he says. “I hate him.” 

Marty sighs. “Just don’t let him get in your head,” he says, sounding resigned. 

Too late. Sasha takes a wild shot at the empty goal and misses—the puck ricochets off the crossbar. Goddammit. 

The Washington Capitals are a well-oiled machine: a steady, productive offense backstopped by a tenacious, elite defense and an almost jaw-droppingly good goaltender, and Sasha hates playing against them, mostly because they never fall for Mitty and Marty’s fakeouts. By second intermission they’re still deadlocked at 0-0, and the game—already ugly—is starting to get nasty. While there haven’t been any fights yet, Sasha can feel the tension in the air, a heavy weight like a storm brewing on the horizon. 

So maybe Sasha curses at Taylor a little more thoroughly than is strictly warranted when he shoves Sasha into the boards. Sasha hates the guy. It’s been a hard, awful game. He’s allowed.

“Your mother must be so ashamed of you,” Taylor says as the referee whistles the first play of the third period dead, black mouth-guard half-hanging out of his mouth. He’s Canadian, Taylor is, and so is Marty, and while they have the same kind of soft, shallow vowels, Marty is fun and easy to listen to but Taylor’s voice grates against Sasha’s nerves. Sasha’s not a fighter—why would he be, when Marty is 6’10” and impossible to take down—but a single word out of Taylor’s mouth makes Sasha want to drop his gloves and start swinging.

“Go fuck yourself,” Sasha says, scowling. 

Taylor grins and, in a bad imitation of Sasha’s Russian accent and a worse imitation of Sasha’s voice, says “Go fuck yourself,” all mocking like. “Come on, Molchalin, what’re you gonna do? Frown at me some more? Y’know your face could get stuck like that.” 

Sasha sneers. His shift is up and he’s supposed to be getting off ice—Hartsy’s half over the boards, looking at him expectantly—and Taylor’s heading back to the Capitals bench, this grin on his face like he’s pleased with himself at getting the last word. Sasha doesn’t care for it. At all. 

He drops his shoulder and half-checks Taylor as he leaves the ice, sending the defenseman reeling, and when Taylor regains his footing and turns around the grin’s gone, replaced by an annoyed stare. 

“Three months and four days,” Sasha says, although if asked he wouldn’t be able to say why: the number just pops into his head, trips off his tongue. “Keep an eye out.” 

“What the fuck, Molchalin?” Taylor shouts after him. 

Hah, Sasha thinks, and skates back to the Flyers bench. 

The Flyers lose—one of the Capitals manages a nasty goal forty seconds before the final buzzer, and the Flyers make an ignominious retreat into the locker room. But that’s fine. Sasha doesn’t mind. It wasn’t Taylor who scored the goal, and Sasha played well. That’s all that he cares about.

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Washington Capitals @Capitals - Feb. 8 Just try to beat us at home, @PSSkimmers. 

Port Sterling Skimmers @PSSkimmers - Feb. 8 We’re setting sail for Washington DC… time to tackle the Capital! 

Washington Capitals @Capitals - Feb. 8 Team bus has been involved in a collision on the I-50E returning from Delaware. Updates will be posted as they come in.

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Of course, Sasha thinks to himself, staring up at the floating, incorporeal form of Clarence Taylor hovering over him, Taylor always did have a way to make him regret literally every decision he’d ever made in his life.

“What the fuck,” Taylor howls in his face. “Three months and four days. That’s what you said. You motherfucker. What, you some fucking psychic or something? What kind of sick freak does that and doesn’t give any context? Jesus Christ. You’re an asshole.” 

Literally five seconds ago Sasha was sleeping. Why is this happening. He’s not awake enough for this.

“What?” Sasha says, when Taylor seems to break off, and then he remembers their last meeting, back in November: Taylor’s shocked green eyes peering at him over the Capitals bench, blond eyebrows furrowed as he gaped at Sasha. He rubs his eyes, sits up, and then, around a yawn, says “You were counting?” 

“Wh—Of course I was counting,” Taylor says, floating backwards. Maybe he’d think it weirder, Clarence Taylor literally floating in Sasha’s bedroom wearing a Capitals shirt and sweatpants, but then again, Sasha’s seen weird, and this is not that. No offense to Mitty, but Mitty kind of breaks the scale of weird shit all on his own. “You mean to tell me that if some asshole came at you with some ominously specific date you’d just, I don’t know, write it off, or whatever? Of course not! I thought you were just gonna play some, some stupid prank on me or something, some bullshit like that, and then—” 

His form flickers out, the space he had been occupying suddenly empty. Sasha blinks. 

“And then what?” Sasha says. Silence. “For the record, I would definitely ignore it, because it would be bullshit and wouldn’t matter anyways.” 

Except Taylor clearly hadn’t let it go. 

There’s no response. Sasha reaches for his phone on his bedside table, and blinks again when he turns it on and it starts buzzing almost incessantly with incoming texts. They’d just finished a long roadie through Canada, and they didn’t have anything except practice later today, so the fact that the group chat is absolutely lighting up is something of a surprise. 

Sasha scrolls through quickly, not bothering to try and decipher most of the texts, but he more or less gets the gist of it: some shit happened with the Capitals. Something big. Maybe Taylor did something stupid. 

He rolls out of bed. Shuffles into his living room, scratching his stomach. Light slants in through the window, and Sasha squints at the sun peeking in through the blinds—it’s earlier than he thought it was. Fumbles for the remote, turns on the TV, switches it to the news—

“Oh, fuck,” Sasha says, suddenly wide awake. His stomach churns. 

It wasn’t Taylor doing something stupid. Not even close. They’re playing footage: a nighttime aerial shot of a charter bus, a tipped-over semi-truck plowed into the side like a beached whale. Streetlights and ambulance strobes and spotlights from helicopters illuminate firefighters and EMTs carting out hockey player after hockey player and bundling them into ambulances. 

“It looks better like this,” Taylor says, his detached, oddly clinical voice coming from somewhere over Sasha’s shoulder, and Sasha almost trips over his coffee table and goes headfirst into his TV. “Not as much blood.” 

God. That’s a horrifying thought. Sasha lets out a string of foul curses, running a hand through his hair. If they had heard, all of the generations of women who came before him would have either given him an ass beating into next year or washed his mouth out with soap. Since he’s in America and they’re buried in Russia, they’ll have to settle for turning in their graves. 

“I only caught about three words of whatever you just said,” Taylor says, “but yeah. That.”  

Sasha looks at him—properly looks at him. Taylor looks mostly exactly like how Sasha saw him last, back in December: blond hair spiked up, red Capitals long-sleeved shirt, sweatpants from some brand Sasha doesn’t recognize, a pair of Ugg boots because apparently Taylor is a teenage girl. He’s dressed down, and he’s see-through, but other than that he looks pretty much like Sasha would expect Taylor to look, even if he wasn’t anticipating the boots.

“You’re dead,” he says, almost a question.

“I think so,” Taylor says. His voice is odd, too, echoing and faintly staticky, like he’s standing in an empty room and Sasha is hearing his voice over the phone from far away. 

Clarence Taylor, dead. It doesn’t seem possible. Sits wrong. Sasha presses his mouth into a thin line to avoid admitting that, because he would never. “And you’re stuck with me.” 

Taylor almost laughs. His chest expands and deflates like he’s actually breathing. Do ghosts breathe? Sasha’s nickname might be ‘Ghost,’ but somehow he doesn’t think he’s an authority on whether spirits need lungs or not. “You think that if I could be anywhere in the world, I’d be hanging out with you?” 

“Nope,” Sasha says, “which means you’re definitely stuck with me.”

“Just what I always wanted,” Taylor mutters, in a way that means this is absolutely not what he wanted, in any sort of way, at all. 

Sasha would agree, but that would mean agreeing with Clarence fucking Taylor, and he has absolutely no urge to do so at any costs. “You don’t have to sound so thrilled about it,” Sasha says. 

“Trust me, I’m not,” Taylor says, and then he fades out of existence, like he was never there to begin with. 

If Clarence Taylor simply didn’t exist, Sasha’s life would have been so much easier. 

But now the guy’s dead, and Sasha doesn’t know what to think.

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Washington Capitals @Capitals - Feb. 9 We’ve received word that several players have passed away, including associate captain RJ Radulov and Jean-Sebastien Fontaine. We ask that you keep their families in mind during this trying time. Stay strong.

Philadelphia Flyers @NHLFlyers - Feb. 9 Our hearts go out to our friends the @Capitals, their families, and everyone affected by the I-50E tragedy. We’re here for you. #CapsStrong

Washington Capitals @Capitals - Feb. 9 Capitals captain Clarence Taylor remains in critical condition at Pennsylvania Hospital.

[serenagaywaterford]

Hey just wanted to let you know I love your blog and your fics, after every episode all I do is check the June/Serena tag on ao3, hope for more content and fix-it fics; never finding them because this fandom is too small and then turning to your amazing fics again, and also coming to your blog to read all your tags because relatable af. I have avoided the THT leaks, but tbh I don't think they can do Serena more dirty than 2x10 which I have erased from my memory, anyways ty for being awesome💕

Hiya, anon! Thank you so much, and I FEEL YOUR PAIN. The fix (esp fix it fic) situation is lacking but I mean, it is expected with such a tiny fandom, I suppose. I am glad that even though there are only a few, the ones we have are all so good. It's a silver lining, no?

I think if this show had kept going in the much more interesting vein of developing the June/Serena dynamic and allyship (even merely platonically), or even just Serena moving forward to not being a complete turd 24-7, we would slowly see more and more fic. I was super excited when so many people jumped on board recently but then the show had to go and... do what it always does. Sigh.

Yeahhhhhhh. I sorta have blocked 2x10 out as well. It's just so irritating and such a bad overall episode that what's even the point in remembering it? Not even the characters seem to remember any of it happening so why should we? Heh. I think about the only this Serena could do worse is literally hurt/kill a child (esp Hannah or Nichole) or actively murder or attempt to murder June. Or even another Handmaid. I dunno. (I am totally done for her to do some murder of certain male characters tho.)

Sad thing is I'm not putting it past this gongshow to do something like that. Make her do something even worse than 2x10. I just have negative trust in them at this point when it comes to Serena's arc and characterization.

I have hope (like the naive fool I am), but not trust.

Anyway!!! Thank you so much again! 💖

[bobby-hockey]

GONGSHOW : A HOCKEY PROJECT ARC 

TW : vehicle accident, severe injury, death

“Your team is fucking weird.”

“Yeah,” Sasha says, “but we're a fucking weird team that's gonna win the Stanley Cup.”

“Yeah?” Taylor surveys the Flyers locker room, inscrutable. In his unchanging Capitals-red shirt he's absurdly out of place in a room full of orange, despite the way he's halfway see through. “Well, I have more faith in you than in my team.”

Sasha hesitates. The crash had forced the Caps to call up a lot of their AHL players and sign a few college prospects and their performance has suffered as a result. Sasha only really knows about this because Taylor keeps insisting he pull up articles for him to read over Sasha’s shoulder, like some sort of masochistic self-flagellation: I got hit by a truck and my team is failing without me. 

“Yeah, well,” Sasha says, feeling useless, and the ghost of Clarence Taylor sighs, fading out of view. 

SUMMARY : Sasha Molchalin accidentally predicts the date of a worldwide hockey tragedy: a semi truck collides with the Washington Capitals’ team bus, killing several players and critically injuring several more. The team will never be the same again. Clarence Taylor, Sasha’s longtime rival, is comatose--but for some reason, his spirit won’t leave Sasha alone. 

MAIN CHARACTERS :  # 44 ALEKSANDER (SASHA) MOLCHALIN - 6′. Left-handed. Hometown: Chekhov, RU. Plays for the Philadelphia Flyers. Reserved, impulsive, restless, independent. # 70 CLARENCE TAYLOR - 6′1″. Right-handed. Hometown: Huntsville, ON. Captain of the Washington Capitals. Loyal, proud, tireless, hurt.

TAGLIST : @hellsigns​ @kidsarentallwrite​

[bobby-hockey]

DUMP AND CHASE : A HOCKEY PROJECT ARC 

“You shouldn’t be here,” Phillip says, after the puck ski ramps off Raineri’s blocker and out of play. 

Jack McCallum turns to look at him, eyes flinty and hard. He looks tired, Phillip thinks, and something in Phillip’s chest hurts—not from where Jack had slammed him into the boards but deeper. Phillip wonders if Jack stays up late reading the comments, too—you always get told not to, because people on the Internet don’t mean shit, but there’s something deeply validating about it, knowing people out there hate you just as much as you feel like they should. Or maybe that’s just a Phillip thing, but—there are a lot of people out there who like what the Capitals are trying to do, and a lot of people who hate it, a lot of speculation about Jack specifically, about what he can do for the Capitals in the absence of Clarence Taylor. 

The consensus: Jack’s good, but not that good. It’s not a pretty consensus. 

“The fuck did you just say to me?” he says. “No, fuck you, I absolutely should be here. God, you’re such a bastard. What, so you think there’s someone else who should?” 

That’s—that’s not what Phillip meant.

SUMMARY :  Jack is a nobody from a nowhere town in Oregon. Phillip is from Toronto, from money, from a hockey family. They have a past, and a complicated one—but can they reconcile their past with their present and future? 

MAIN CHARACTERS :  # 35 JACK McCALLUM - 6′4″. Right-handed. Hometown: Bendbrook Falls, OR. Plays for the Washington Capitals after the Capitals’ bus accident. Confident, mouthy, hardworking, idealist.  # 7 PHILLIP DeCOTEAU - 5′11″. Right-handed. Hometown: Hamilton, ON. Plays for the Buffalo Sabres. Shy, skilled, privileged, self-conscious.

ARC INFO : Overlaps with birdcage, gongshow, bottle rocket, and bar down. 

TAGLIST : @hellsigns​ 

[bobby-hockey]

THE HOCKEY PROJECT: A Catalog

Truly, the number of hockey boys I write is absurd. Under the cut you’ll find a description of all the ‘arcs’--or mini-WIPs--within the Hockey Project. (If you see this reblogged, it means there’s been an update, and there are more hockey boys. Feel free to ask to be tagged for a specific arc, or for all of them.) 

1984 The year? 1984. The Winter Olympics? Underway. Jolene Pattison? America’s best goalie.

405 face-off Avery Hope plays for the Seattle Thunderbirds at one end of the I-405. Nick Jagers plays for the Everett Silvertips at the other. A love song for the greater Seattle region.

bar down Jason has been half in love with Conrad, his liney, since they were kids. It's fine.

beaut Dylan Beaubouee gets hit and, for the first time in his life, doesn't immediately get back up. Hundreds of miles away, his ex d-partner Simon Sarkarian overdoses. Together, they recover.

birdcage Quintino Raineri doesn't belong here. In a single night the NHL team he had been drafted to was reduced to only a handful of players, and Quin went from being Harvard's goalie to playing for an honest to god NHL team. One of his fellow NCAA-turned-NHL athletes, Jesse Kovaks, former captain of the Michigan State Spartans, gets it. Like fish out of water, they become friends.

blue line pinch River Dawson, a solid but troubled defenseman, ends up in hotter water than he expects. Three weeks, a phone call, and a plane ride later he's in Port Sterling with a baby on his hip. But there's one person he didn't account for—his new defense partner, who takes no shit and no prisoners.

bottle rocket Toby McCallum is the only girl McCallum. The only girl on her hockey team. The only girl allowed in the boys' changing room—well, not anymore, since rink management pitched a fit about there being a girl in the boys' room, and now Toby has to use the girls' locker room. Enter Stacy Watanabe, a figure skater whose team practices at the same time the hockey team does.

dangle & deke Zach Reddall, as the Port Sterling Skimmers' play-by-play announcer, isn't supposed to hate any of the Skimmers, but fuck if Bradford Chandler, every single frat boy distilled into a single terrible human being, doesn't get on his nerves. A story about growth, potential, and learning to unlearn.

dump and chase They met at hockey camp years ago, back when Jack McCallum was a nobody from a small town in Oregon and Phillip DeCoteau was a rising star from Toronto. Now, they face each other as equals on the ice, and both face the things they've never talked about.

five for fighting Karel Krejčí gets divorced, moves halfway across the country, sleeps around, plays hockey, gets hurt, starts fights, gets hurt more, and falls in love.

gloves off  After the bus crash that irrevocably changes the Washington Capitals, everything is different. Mally and Tamps adjust. 

gongshow Sasha Molchalin tells him that in three months he'll die, which is the weirdest chirp Clarence Taylor has possibly ever heard. Three months later, the team bus gets hit by a semi. Clarence Taylor is dead for three minutes, and then he's comatose, and then he's spiritually linked to his fucking rival, which is like. That's great. Like his day couldn't get any worse.

lighting the lamp What happens when problematic coaching practices are systematic, not incidental? And what happens to the kids who've moved on? For Kirby and Nordy, signing to a Port Sterling Skimmers team in turmoil after the toxic nature of the University of Michigan's men's hockey program was exposed almost feels like escape--almost. But unlearning the things the University of Michigan taught them is a longer and harder battle than anyone anticipates, and the journey has only just begun.

odd man rush At the end of his Calder-worthy rookie season, breakout forward Jeremy Fitzpatrick gets traded from the struggling Vancouver Canucks to the hopeless Port Sterling Skimmers, bringing with him versatility, high scoring capability, and something that could divide the hockey world straight down the middle.

save selection Johnathan Dickinson is better known for his Tumblr blog than for his goaltending, which is how he likes it. He doesn't need to be good at goaltending to be good at goalie analysis, and analysis--and GIFs of goalies losing their shit--is what his blog is known for. But then the Flyers backup gets sent down, Johnny gets pulled up, and he has to learn how to cover for himself--and fast.

scramble At 5′5″, Mitty is the shortest player in the NHL. At 6′10″, Marty is the tallest. They are teammates, best friends, and partners in crime. 

sharpshooter Dallas Lee falls in love hard and fast and easy, and falling in love with Selby Montague is no different. But then there's the problem of Reese Holowinski, and also the fact that they're all teammates.

splitting the d Patty-and-Dunks, defensemen for the Seattle Thunderbirds, are inseparable--or, at least, that's what everyone thinks. Truthfully, they've been split before, and they'll be split again, but they'll find their way home to each other--somehow they always do.

stay in the crease Bryan Weaver doesn't go into the season expecting anything different from his rookie backup, especially since he managed to run off the last three. If he functionally adopts the kid, it's nobody's business but his own.

tape to tape What happens at Junior Worlds should stay at Junior Worlds. Right? Unfortunately, that's not the case for Finland native Tahvo Kyllonen—the year after the Junior Worlds tournament where he developed the world's most poorly timed crush on American Chase Atkins, they both end up playing for the Columbus Blue Jackets, and—even better—playing on the same goddamn line. Now if Chase would stop smiling at Tahvo like that, that would be fantastic.

tic-tac-toe Carson “Kitty” Kittka is a sweet rookie in the brutal world of professional hockey. Elias Koskela, captain of the Port Sterling Skimmers, is a little worried. Just a little bit. 

top shelf Everyone keeps saying the starting goalie for the Flames, Andrej Novik, is a nice guy, but Matthew Klatzky, his backup, doesn't see it. Like, really doesn't see it.

[bobby-hockey]

BIRDCAGE : A HOCKEY PROJECT ARC 

“I think I’m going to puke,” Rainy says, low, as he gets into his pads. They’re his Harvard pads, white and Harvard cardinal blackened with puck marks: as far as Jesse’d heard, there’d been no time to get a new set of pads for him, no time for him to break them in. 

In the locker room, it’s hard to hear the roar of the crowd, but the Capitol One Arena is still loud as hell, and Jesse can feel it somewhere deep in his bones. He surveys the team: it’s basically the AHL team, with the addition of Jesse and Q and a handful of other college recruits, and everyone else looks like they’re about to hurl, too, with this greenish, nervous tint to them. One of the AHLers is trying to rally his defensive partner, to little avail. 

They’d had one practice as a team. 

One practice. It’s not nearly enough. 

The Capitals played a tough game against the Port Sterling Skimmers the day before yesterday and came out on top, but the Skimmers are a terrifying team, not in the least because they’re balls-to-the-wall crazy. An AHL team--which is what this is, essentially--doesn’t stand a chance.

“We got this,” Jesse says, and tries to sound like he means it.

SUMMARY :  Jesse Kovaks, the captain of the Michigan State Spartans, got seventeen hours to prepare for playing in the NHL. Quin, in goal for Harvard, got twelve, when it became clear that the AHL goalie was too concussed to play. They meet in a broken locker room, and have to figure out where to go from there. 

MAIN CHARACTERS : # 38 JESSE KOVAKS - 6′2″. Right-handed. Hometown: Jericho, VT. Plays for the Washington Capitals after the Capitals’ bus accident.  # 22 QUINTINO RAINERI - 6′1″. Catches right. Hometown: Boston, MA. Plays for the Washington Capitals after the Capitals’ bus accident. 

ARC INFO : Overlaps with gongshow, dump and chase, gloves off, and 1984.

TAGLIST : @hellsigns​ @kidsarentallwrite​