#tragic austenian separation

[linskywords]

Hi Linsky, love love all of your work and ‘more than i could ever promise’ is one of my favorite fics ever! I was looking through old tags and saw you mentioned a 1988 Persuasion AU, is that still something that’s in the works?

Funny you should mention that! I was actually just thinking about how I would love to write a story for Jack Eichel and Noah Hanifin now that Noah's been traded to the Knights, and the more I thought about it the more it was obvious that Persuasion is the perfect narrative for them. They fall in love in the USNTDP and stay together when they're both in Boston, but then someone (a parent?) convinces Noah that if they try to stay together long-distance when they're both in the NHL they'll be miserable and get outed and ruin both of their careers. Noah's not sure he'd be able to bring himself to break up with Jack if it was just his own career at stake, but if if staying together means also ruining Jack's...

So he breaks up with Jack, and Jack is furious and betrayed, and they don't speak for years. Noah resigns himself to being loveless in a career that feels lonelier by the year, and he thinks that if he could go back in time he would tell his eighteen-year-old self to forget about caution and practicality and just stay with the person who meant the most to him in the world. But it's obviously too late for that now. They play in different countries, and Jack won't even talk to him.

But then Jack has to talk to him, because Noah gets traded.