#we should also have a conversation about how obsessed we are with shooting the puck low

[the-physicality]

.

[lumosinlove]

Sweater Weather

part xxi

[see tags for tw]

Regulus liked the cubs. Finn was a little out there maybe, but Logan, off of the ice at least, was steady and put together.

Leo had snorted when he’d told him what he thought. “Interesting take.”

They didn’t seem to mind having him around, although there wasn’t much time lately when Regulus didn’t feel like an intruder on something. Living in his brother’s house when he probably wanted to be alone with Remus. Leo inviting him over to nights that would probably feel and go differently if he wasn’t there.

But he didn’t feel unwelcome. Just out of place. Which was surprising, given the fact that he was a Snake. Had been. He still felt like he was one, anyway. A Snake. An intruder. Out of place.

And now the Lupins were here to stay and Regulus was self-aware enough to realize that he was seeing for the first time what was probably the most loving family in the entire world.

“Julian, sweetheart, you have to let Sirius rest. He’s got some big days coming up, as you well know.”

Julian looked up at his mother.

Regulus wasn’t sure if Julian liked him all that much yet. Although, he didn’t really blame the kid. When you were little, the rivalries seemed like a full-blown military crises. That was how the Lions had seemed to him, at least. A real beast, with sharp teeth. He imagined that, for Julian, he had venom and a tail that rattled.

“But—” Julian looked up at Sirius, who was playing goalie in one of the make-shift nets that he had set up in the living room.

“It’s okay, Hope,” Sirius said. “We’ll go another half hour.”

“You’ll go until dinner, which is in ten minutes,” Hope said.

“Well, it that case, bud, we should go help set the table, non?” Sirius stood straight from his goalie-crouch. “We can play more later.”

“Really?” Julian said, clutching his hockey stick.

“Mais, oui. Allez, let’s go help your dad and Re.”

It left Regulus alone with Hope in Sirius’ large living room. Hope was a mother. Regulus didn’t know how to put her smile and that role together yet. He watched her put her hands on her hips and look around. Even Regulus had to admit that the living room was mostly empty and bland. Sirius clearly didn’t know what to do with a house besides sleep and eat there.

“Well,” Hope said, and then smiled at Regulus. “Needs some brightening, huh?”

“Probably.”

Hope nodded. “Probably. Come on, let’s eat.”

Regulus followed her through to the dining room where Lyall was setting plates of salmon and rice down, along with a large salad. As Sirius sat down, Julian all but climbed over Remus to get the chair beside him. Remus’ eyes found Regulus’, maybe by accident, but he smiled, and Regulus did, too, a little. Regulus gestured to his own chair, on Sirius’ other side, and moved across the table instead. He sort of wanted to sit beside Hope, anyway. He wasn’t sure why.

“Here you go, sweetheart,” Hope said, passing him a glass of water and a bread roll.

“Thank you.”

Family dinners had not been like this. He found Sirius’ eyes, and the thought seemed to pass between them.

Really, the place was crawling with families. Not Sirius’ house, but Gryffindor. Hogwarts Arena. Regulus had watched Logan be practically tackled by someone who could only have been Leo’s mother, with her bright blond hair. Leo’s father, also blond, had walked right up to Pascal, shaking his hand. He had a sharpie in his back pocket and a wide smile. Finn also looked just like his mother. Haley O’Hara and her dark red hair, cropped in a pixie cut, shared her sons’ easy smiles, but her startling blue eyes were her own. Ramsey O’Hara was dark haired and brown eyed, and always video taping. Alex had been wearing a Heart-throb-O’Hara t-shirt. Marius and Iva Tremblay were quieter, but Iva looked just like her son, and kept pulling Logan into her arms, her eyes almost relieved when they looked at her son’s smile. The Tremblay sisters were anything but quiet.

Regulus, while surrounded, had tended to keep close to one wall. The quiet kindness of the Lupins was welcomed.

Regulus also kept to himself during dinner, listening to the conversation and taking seconds—and thirds—of the food.

“Hungry teenage hockey player,” Lyall laughed, raising his wine glass towards Regulus. “That’s something I remember, eh, Remus?”

Remus smiled and glanced at Sirius. “I don’t think the hungry part stops after teenage years, dad.”

Sirius glanced up, mouth full. “No, it doesn’t.”

Regulus smiled, watching as Julian seemed to be trying to time his own bites with Sirius’. He remembered being that obsessed only, back then, it was just a little brother thing, not a Captain Sirius Black thing.

“So,” Hope said, leaning on her elbows and lacing her fingers. “For the dinner tomorrow. Re, why don’t you and Sirius go get the food?”

“Please let me go with,” Julian said. “Please, please, mom.”

“You’re on house duty with me. Plus, Remus and Sirius will be going right from morning skate, so—”

“He can come to morning skate with us,” Sirius said.

Remus nodded. “Yeah, mom, it’s no problem.”

“You’ll both be working, who would—”

“I don’t need to be watched, mom,” Julian begged. “Please let me go.”

“Julian, it’s not a babysitter, it’s just that—”

“I can…” Regulus glanced around. “Not watch him, but…we can hang out.”

The table went a little quiet. Regulus felt a little dizzy, like someone was going to swing at him. He knew that wasn’t true.

“I’ll probably go to the rink and watch, anyways,” Regulus continued into the quiet, looking at Julian, then Hope. “I’m going out with Leo after, so.”

“Leo Knut?” Hope said and then smiled. “Oh, I’m so glad you two are friends.”

Everyone kept saying that.

“Well, Jules?” Hope said. “Alright?”

“Okay,” Julian said hesitantly, eyes on Regulus. Regulus flashed him a tight smile and then looked back down to his plate.

He volunteered for clean up duty, just so he didn’t have to make conversation. It wasn’t awkward, but he wasn’t used to these laughter filled living rooms. He wasn’t used to Sirius’ laugh. It threw him off guard.

“Regulus?”

Regulus looked up from the sink to see Remus behind him in the kitchen window’s reflection. He was all shades of night, until Regulus turned around and he was warm again. Remus looked almost nervous, leaning back against the refrigerator.

“What’s up?” Regulus said.

“I just,” Remus glanced down the hallway, then shrugged. “I know Julian’s…not exactly warmed up to you. Thank you for offering anyway.”

Regulus turned back around to the soapy water. “Don’t worry about that. I get it. I’d probably be the same.”

“It’s just that, it isn’t you. It’s—”

“Remus, I know what it’s like to be brought up in a hockey household. There’s a whole lot of loyalty. And sometimes loyalty doesn’t change easily,” Regulus glanced back once more. “Don’t worry. I understand. I’m a Snake right now. He’s a Lion. I’m someone who betrayed their brother, and he’s someone who loves his brother more than anything.”

He could feel Remus’ eyes on his back.

“I understand,” he said again, and turned the water back on.

“Well, thank you again. I think you guys will like each other a lot.”

Regulus nodded. “I hope so.”

~

It was the Lions’ last practice before they would get on a plane for game one against the Snakes. Regulus knew he would be taking a risk, traveling with the team there. But he wanted to show that he wasn’t afraid. Part of him even hoped that he ran into Snape, or Riddle, or Malfoy, or any of them. Just to show that he was better off. The other part of him didn’t want to care what they thought.

Regulus could picture the stadium and the entire, green crowd that hissed and cheered. With the drums of the music, a single spot-light would appeared on the ice, and with each successive beat, one of three very familiar words. The Snakes’ motto.

ALWAYS

PURE

HOCKEY

Toujours pur, Regulus could remember his father saying to them growing up, accompanied by the slap of pucks against the boards, and endless drills. Toujours pur, toujours pur—

Someone tapped his arm, and Regulus looked up to meet Leo’s gaze. He was lacing his skates.

“Ça va?” he said, which made Logan look up.

“Oui,” Logan said, then noticed Leo looking at Regulus, not him. “Oh. Ça va?”

“I hope you beat them,” Regulus said. “That’s all.”

“Well, yeah,” Logan laughed, wrapping tape around his socks tightly. “Me too.”

“Regulus,” Julian came up to them. He was in a Tremblay jersey today and Logan wrestled him into a gentle headlock, making him laugh before looking back up at Regulus. “Sirius is going out to warm up can we please go watch?”

Leo smiled. “Take him out.”

Regulus couldn’t help but smile a little, too. “All right. Allez.”

Sirius was doing shooting drills, rubbing absentmindedly at his healed ribs. It was nice to be around the sounds of the ice again. Sirius’ basement didn’t count.

Remus was on the bench, sitting on the boards with his feet dangling near the ice. Every once in a while, Sirius would swoop by for a kiss, or to say something that made Remus laugh. The other boys were filing out slowly. Finn and Logan were passing a puck back and forth while Leo dropped into the splits, stretching and talking to them. Evgeni and Jackson were ramming each other into the boards and laughing. The atmosphere would change once Coach came out, but Regulus now knew that it wasn’t like in Slytherin. There was never any silence. The laughter never went away, not even when they were working hard.

“Why did you leave?” Julian asked suddenly. He was standing nearly pressed against the glass, watching. They made eye contact in the slight reflection from the lights. He looked just like his older brother, something people always said to Regulus, too.

“I…” Regulus took a breath. “I wanted to leave.”

“Why?”

“I wanted better for myself,” Regulus said carefully. “I think we should always want the best for ourselves, non?”

“What if you can’t have the best? My brother wanted to play hockey.”

Regulus glanced over at Remus, laughing as Kasey squirted him with his water bottle, and thought of the right words.

“What’s best isn’t always attached to a thing or a person?” he tried. “Sometimes it’s a good attitude. What I meant was, I thought I was stuck. Then, my brother showed me I wasn’t.”

“So, Sirius is the best for you?”

“Sirius showed me that I could be the best for me. But, oui, Sirius is pretty great. So is your brother.”

“I know that,” Julian said, and rested his forehead against the glass again. He was quiet, and then, “You said bad things about Sirius. I saw it on youtube.”

Regulus chewed on his cheek. “Yeah.”

“But then you said good things.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you say sorry?”

Regulus swallowed. “Yeah.”

“That’s good.”

Sirius skated up fast and hard and stopped in front of the glass, knocking his helmet over where Julian had his forehead. Julian laughed and knocked gently back.

“Ça va?” Sirius asked, glancing at Regulus.

“Oui,” Julian replied and Regulus nodded.

“Hey Jules,” Sirius said, loudly to be heard over the noises of practice. “Tell Reg to make you un sandwich de la rondelle in the kitchen.”

He skated away with a grin at Regulus, who couldn’t help but smile back. The words brought back a memory that he hadn’t thought about in a long time. It left Julian looking half expectant and half skeptical.

“Allez,” Regulus sighed as he pushed himself up from his seat. “I’ll let you in on a Sirius Black tradition.”

“Okay,” Julian grinned.

The Lions kitchen was a strange sense of déjà-vu. It was the Snakes’, only awash in brighter colors.

“What’s a sandwich…sandwich ron…”

“Sandwich de la rondelle,” Regulus repeated, opening cupboards until he found bread and peanut butter, and swiping a banana from the counter.

“It’s a peanut butter and banana sandwich,” Julian said.

“Oui, sort of. But—Les bananes,” Regulus held up the fruit. “Sirius use to fry them in cinnamon and honey and then they would become darker because they’re caramelized. They would look like little hockey pucks, or la rondelle.”

“I want one,” Julian said. “Please.”

Regulus laughed. “I thought you might.”

~

Sirius watched from the bed as Remus pulled on a long sleeved white shirt. The cotton clung to his strong shoulders and he shook the sleeve out over his watch. Sirius could see his star necklace through the thin fabric. Remus pushed his sandy hair off of his forehead and looked up at the shelves again, patted his dark jeans, and then turned the closet light off. He stopped when he stepped out and raised an eyebrow.

“That’s not exactly what I call dressed for guests who are showing up in—” he looked at his watch. “ten minutes.”

Sirius stretched out against the bed. “You look good, Loup.”

“I’m wearing jeans and a shirt.”

“I said you look good, I don’t care what you’re wearing.”

Remus smiled and knelt on the mattress. “Then in that case, you look good, too.”

“I’m naked.”

“Then what’s that on your face?”

Sirius groaned. “It’s tradition.” He touched the dark beard on his cheeks and chin. He was keeping it short and neat, rather than letting it grow wild like some of the other guys, but he still felt a little self-conscious. “It isn’t that bad…”

Remus crawled forward until he was poised over Sirius’ body. “You know you look good.” He leaned down to brush a kiss over Sirius’ cheek, feeling the coarse stubble against his lips. “But this place is going to be filled with families in two seconds.”

“Hm,” Sirius leaned up to kiss Remus’ throat, and Remus felt the scratch there, too.

“Parents,” Remus warned.

Sirius kissed along Remus’ jaw.

“Dumo.”

Sirius sighed. “We should get dressed.”

Sirius, forced into a pair of tight jeans and a button down by Remus, opened the front door to see Pascal standing there with Katie on his shoulders.

“Bonsoir,” Pascal said. “I come bearing hungry children and the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Sirius laughed and Celeste slapped Pascal’s chest. “Well, there’s a Leo Knut cooking with a Hope Lupin so I think we’ll be able to help with that.”

“Is Logan here?” Adele said, pushing her way past her family.

“Yeah, living room. What, don’t care about me anymore?”

She rolled her eyes and gave him a hard hug before disappearing into the house.

Celeste gave Sirius a smile, looking after Adele. “We are still missing Logan being just downstairs. You were a hard loss, too, you know.”

“Tremzy,” Katie said and pointed forward.

Logan appeared with Adele under his arm and Pascal ducked down so Logan could take Katie into his arms.

“Salut, Katie,” Logan pressed kisses to her cheeks until she laughed.

Sirius watched them wander off towards the kitchen and then looked back at Celeste. “I think it goes both ways.”

“I am going to see if the chefs need any help,” Celeste said, and followed Logan and her daughters towards the kitchen.

Sirius watched them for a moment, and then turned back to Pascal. “Where are Louis and Marc?”

“Sleepover,” Pascal laughed and stepped inside, handing Sirius a bottle of wine. “I guess playoffs aren’t that cool anymore. Katie seems to like hockey the best.”

“She’d make a killer center.”

Pascal scoffed. “Killer, eh? Been hanging out with Remus.”

Sirius smiled. “Of course.”

“What about your younger one?”

Sirius closed the door and the warmth of the house picked up again. “With the younger Lupin down at the rink.”

“Oh? They are friends now?”

“I was surprised, too.”

Pascal patted Sirius’ back as they came through to the kitchen. “Kids are quick to forgive.”

“Blow on the spoon first,” Leo was saying to Katie. “So you don’t burn your tongue, and then tell me what you think.”

Logan laughed softly, kissing Katie’s cheek again. “Our entire dinner is riding on you, mon coeur.”

Sirius watched as Katie blew very carefully on the waiting bolognese sauce, and then let Leo feed her the spoon while she held onto Logan’s neck. His eyes found Finn next, who had a look on his face that Sirius knew well. Sirius looked at Remus, holding a glass of wine and talking to Eloise Knut and Hope.

Sirius could get used to this.

“Where are your parents, Dumo?” Sirius asked.

“I’ll fly them out when we win,” Pascal smiled, knocked on Sirius’ head, and then put a hand on his shoulder. “You know… Sometimes I want to shove you back in my basement and never let you out. But then I remember you’re not the same boy you were.”

One corner of Sirius’ mouth lifted. “That would be threatening, coming from someone else.”

“Yes, but you know what I mean.”

“Ouais,” Sirius said, and put his hand over Pascals. “I know.”

“This has been a hard season. Your team is going to work hard for you.”

“Pascal,” Sirius said softly.

“Dumasha,” Sergei’s gruff voice called, and he appeared beside them, clapping Pascal on the back. “Come play bubble hockey with me. I’m beating all the kids. Omg.”

“No, he’s not,” Thomas yelled.

“I’ll win,” Pascal warned.

“We’ll see, you lumberjack,” Sergei patted Pascal’s thick beard before retreating back towards the living room.

Pascal tussled Sirius’ hair once before following, and Sirius watched him go. His memories of living with the Dumais’ felt at once distant and like yesterday. The earliest ones were covered with ice. He had been terrified of his own family and his new one. The later ones went from ice to slowly melting frost to new, spring soil. Pascal had done that. And Celeste and the kids. And Arthur, and the team.

Remus.

Sirius walked over to where he was standing with the two women.

“Well, if it isn’t Sirius Black,” Eloise smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, honey.”

Sirius, a little surprised, laughed. “Hi, Mrs. Knut. Hope.”

“Hello, sweetheart,” Hope said. “Nice party we have here.”

“Thanks to you and Remus.”

“Oh,” Hope laughed and rubbed Sirius’ shoulder. “You have a beautiful house, it should be filled with your loved ones. A truly beautiful house…”

“Mom,” Remus laughed. “You can stop telling Sirius his house is beautiful.”

“Then I’ll tell him he’s beautiful. And probably so will your father. Sirius, my husband loves you.”

“Tell me about it,” Eloise said. “Wyatt’s walking around with a sharpie, so if you see him be ready.”

Sirius huffed out a laugh. “I’m ready.”

“He loves you. Not as much as Jules, of course,” Hope said.

Remus gestured to himself. “Um.”

“Of course, not as much as Remus,” Hope and Eloise smiled at each other. “I’ll leave you two. I’m going to find that Potter baby.”

Eloise hummed. “I’m gonna go convince Leo’s boys to move home with him for the summer.”

Remus smiled. “I don’t think you’ll have too hard a time.”

“Oh, I know I won’t.”

Sirius pulled Remus against his side, leaning back against the wall to look out at the scene that the kitchen was. Remus settled against him.

“You know,” Remus began, and then cut off.

“Quoi?” Sirius asked. He looked down at Remus’ thoughtful smile.

“Whether or not things…happen…”

Sirius laughed, knowing that this was Remus’ way of getting around setting him off in a round of superstition.

Remus looked up at him. “We’re doing pretty great.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Good.”

Remus tilted his chin up, obviously wanting a kiss, and Sirius complied.

“I can’t believe we’re getting on a plane tomorrow,” Sirius sighed.

“Is Regulus still coming?”

Sirius nodded grudgingly. “No matter how many times I tell him it might be a bad idea. Even Minnie says—”

“He lost his rookie season,” Remus said. “I think he needs to be a part of this.”

“He’ll get—harassed by reporters.”

“So will you, and you’re still going.”

Sirius smiled and pulled Remus in closer, wine glass pressed carefully against the small of his back as he looped his arms around him. “That’s different.”

Remus wrinkled his nose. “Is it?”

“I’m the Captain. I’m just worried.”

“A true Captain’s job,” Logan said as he passed them, Timmy and Olli in tow.

“I am,” Sirius said after them, and when he looked back down it was to be kissed by Remus.

“Dinner!” Leo shouted, Hope beside him putting a stack of plates out. “Y’all come get it.”

“I’m gonna die,” Finn sighed, stopping beside them. “The accent is so here right now and I’m just—I’m gonna die.”

“Harzy, are you talking to us?” Remus asked.

Alex looked up from where he was standing with Kasey and Natalie. “Just ignore him, he’s a fucking puppy.”

“I’m pep-talking myself,” Finn took a long sip of his drink. “For life.”

Alex patted his back. “Okay, Fish, get it together.”

“Stop yelling at me.”

“I’m not yelling at you.”

“You’re yelling. I’m telling mom.”

Alex scoffed as they walked towards the food. “You can’t tell mom.”

Sirius snorted and pulled Remus away towards the plates to serve themselves.

~

Game one was rough and fast and disappointing. When Sirius had first skated out, the hisses had been deafening. Remus had watched from the bench with his nails digging into his palms. The Snakes had won 3-0. Close, but not enough. Kasey had made forty saves. Elias Cook had taken a puck to the knee and Remus knew even before evaluating him that he might be out for the run. Snape had been vicious. But so had Sirius. The locker room had been crowded, the families wonderful but adding pressure, and Remus was more than happy to watch Sirius collapse on their hotel bed. He was still in his game suit, but it was rumpled. The steely color had faded as the adrenaline did, and he looked tired.

“Fuck,” Sirius sighed, and raised his chin to look at Remus. “Why are you standing over there? C’mere.”

Remus laughed and chucked his bag down before falling beside Sirius onto the bed.

“Hell of a game,” Remus said. “It’s just one game.”

“Yeah,” Sirius replied, and then was quiet. “Riddle’s a good goalie.”

“So is Kasey.”

“No, I know, I just… we really couldn’t get a single shot in. I’m just happy we weren’t at home. God, Kasey’s probably just…kicking himself right now.”

“Nat’s here. And his family. She’ll talk some sense into him.” Remus said. After a moment, he groaned and sat up again. “Speaking of home, we should pack for the flight back tomorrow.”

Sirius groaned. “Come back.”

Remus laughed. “We have to be out the door at six tomorrow, and I know you won’t want to get up early to do it then. Just put your suit away, that’s all you brought anyway.”

“I just played an entire hockey game.”

Remus suppressed a smile as he took one of Sirius’ ankles and pulled off his shoe. “The world doesn’t know you’re like this.”

“Non.”

“I could tell them, you know.”

Sirius laughed. “That you undress me?”

Remus smiled. When both shoes had clunked to the floor, he straddled Sirius’ hips, hands going to his belt. “You’re right, maybe not.”

Sirius smiled and let his head fall back with a groan. “Fuck.” Remus let Sirius pull him down against his chest. “You’re so hot, but I’m so tired.”

“Oh, no way we were not about to have sex. You are waking up at six in the morning and you’re playing the game of your life the next night.”

Sirius let out a content sigh. “Hm.”

Remus pressed a kiss to his neck and then reached for the buttons of his shirt.

“I think we have to go to the net harder,” Sirius said thoughtfully as Remus pulled him into a sitting position.

“I think we need to get a handle on our power play,” Remus said, pushing Sirius’ shirt over his broad shoulders. He kissed those, too. “I think Coach should put Finn back on it. He’s ruthless when he wants to be.”

Sirius hummed. “Yeah. Him and James do well together, too. Will you murder me if I watch some tape?”

“You’re going to sleep.”

“I just want to see that second period play. You know—”

“Tremz was off-side and, no, Carrow didn’t push him,” Remus smiled when Sirius made a face. “Believe me, it happened right in front of me.”

“We were going to score.”

“I know,” Remus bent to kiss the scar on Sirius’ cheek, then the one on his lip. “But that’s hockey.”

Sirius kicked his pants off once Remus stood to go to his own suitcase. “I wish we had come out of the gate strong, that’s all.”

Remus snorted, tugging off his shirt. “Nice media lingo, there.”

Sirius rolled onto his stomach with a groan, then pushed himself into a standing position. A moment later, Remus felt his chest against his bare back, their skin warm against each other.

Sirius’ hands stroked over Remus’ sides, dipping into the muscle that cut along his hips. “You haven’t even asked me how my ribs are,” Sirius said against Remus’ temple. Remus could hear the smile in his voice. “You always ask.”

“I know you’re better,” Remus leaned against him, tilting his head to the side when Sirius began to kiss his neck gently. He put his hands over Sirius’. “I know we didn’t win, but you were amazing tonight.” He turned in Sirius’ arms and wound his fingers in his dark hair. "You see everything out there, huh?”

“I try,” Sirius said softly.

“You do,” Remus kissed him, then again and again. “Don’t get in your head, baby. You’re good.”

Sirius let out a breath, lips against Remus’ cheek. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Remus wrapped his arms around Sirius’ waist and held him there.

“Just tape for, like, ten—“

Remus pressed in closer. “Nope.”

Sirius’ laugh rumbled against his cheek. “Come to bed with me, then.”

~

It was better to be back in Gryffindor. Remus didn’t want to admit how much of a weight it was off of his chest to be away. To have the team away, and Regulus. It had been fine. Regulus hadn’t been bothered. Not yet, at least. They would be on a plane back to Slytherin tomorrow, win or lose.

“Shitter-McFucks,” Thomas said loudly. “We gotta win this game.”

“Where do you come up with these things?” Sergei sighed.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said, and he looked thoughtful. “They come to me. Makes sense though, right?”

Sergei made a barely affirmative sound and returned to taping his stick.

“T,” Remus said, smiling a little at the conversation. He held out Thomas’ shoulder pads. “Fixed it.”

Thomas took it and clutched it to his chest. “Sick, thanks, Loops. I love you.”

Remus smiled and turned to the room. “Does anyone need anything?”

There were a few murmurs of no, and Remus let out a breath. “Okay.”

Remus glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes until they had to be out for warm ups. Sometimes it was strange, thinking about the Snakes in this very building, doing the same thing they were. Taping sticks, getting dressed, stretching. Remus’ eyes found Regulus, who was sitting in Sirius’ stall while Sirius stretched out on the floor. They were talking intently, no doubt about the game. Regulus seemed to be drawing plays out on his palm, Sirius nodding along, then pointing, as if to correct something. Remus smiled at the sight, then walked over and crouched by Sirius’ shoulder.

Sirius looked up, hands around his ankles stretched in front of him. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Remus replied, and glanced at the door.

Sirius blinked. “Oh.”

“And I’m out,” Regulus sighed and stood.

Sirius stood, too, adjusting his snapback and catching Remus’ fingers. “Yes, yes, now?”

“I thought you could use a pick-me-up.”

Sirius cursed under his breath, grinning. “Re…”

He already looked flushed with it—with just the thought—and Remus wanted him. Badly.

Sirius was on his heels until they got to the PT room, looking carefully out into the hallway before shutting the door and turning the lock. He was still smiling when he turned, gently taking hold of Remus’ hips and backing him against the exam table.

“I love you,” he said into his first kiss, and then, into the second, “how do you want me?”

Remus hooked his fingers into the band of Sirius’ spandex and turned them so that his back was against the table, cushioned by the padding. Sirius leaned down to kiss along Remus’ neck.

Remus reached down to cup Sirius’ cock through the thin material of his spandex. “Just like this.”

“Jesus,” Sirius breathed. “Fuck, we—how much time?”

“We have time.”

Remus knelt on one knee, then the other. He pulled the spandex away to reveal Sirius’ cock, half hard but twitching as it filled. Remus’ heart beat faster, his own cock beginning to press out against his thigh.

Sirius’ hand was gentle against the back of Remus’ head as he took him into his mouth, sucking on the damp head.

Sirius half laughed, half moaned, brows drawn together a little as Remus took him down further. He was fattening up to full now, slick and heavy in Remus’ mouth.

“Ah—” Remus looked up to see Sirius’ head fall back. The tension fell out of his shoulders. His back arched a little, defined abs flexing through the thin material of his black undershirt. “Yeah—”

Remus sucked harder, keeping a hand wrapped around the base of his cock, stroking softly in the way he knew Sirius liked. Sirius was already spilling thinly over his tongue, bitter and warm. Remus pulled off to the head again, pressing his tongue to the slit hard and making Sirius jolt.

“God, Remus—” Sirius choked the words out, cock slicking itself more as Remus reached down to cup his balls and stroke behind them. Sirius widened his stance, welcoming the touch. “Ouais—yes.”

Remus stilled and pressed his hands behind Sirius’ hips, coaxing them forward gently. Sirius blinked down at him blearily. “You—you want me…”

Remus pushed Sirius’ hips forward more insistently and looked up. Sirius’ fingers tightened in Remus’ hair.

“Merde,” his hips fucked forward, almost on their own. “Re.”

And Sirius complied, fucking himself into Remus’ hot mouth in slow strokes. Remus was hot and aching in his own pants, and he reached down to push them under his balls. He moaned at the first touch, and Sirius picked up his pace. Remus’ breathed in through his nose, smelling Sirius’ slight sweat, and fucked his fist in time to Sirius’ hips. He was heavy on his tongue. Sirius’ breathing was heavy, eyes dark and hair curling out form under his hat. He was gorgeous, and strong, and Remus didn’t care if they won a silver cup when he had those silver eyes.

Sirius’ mouth was open, eyes tight with pleasure as he watched his cock sink in and out of Remus’ mouth, watched Remus’ hips move at the same time. Remus moaned as he pressed his palm against his own head, fingers tight around his shaft.

“Mon—I’m gonna—”

Remus felt flushed and turned on by Sirius standing there, half dressed before a game with his swollen cock looking like that. It was only a few more strokes before Remus felt Sirius begin to come in his mouth. Sirius’ hips stilled, abs flexing in, and Remus bobbed his head, sucking him through it.

“Yes, yes,” Sirius whispered, head dropped back again. He stopped breathing and grit his teeth. He pushed his cock into Remus’ mouth once, twice. “Ah.”

Remus pulled off when Sirius made a soft, sensitive sound. Sirius took one look at him, chest heaving, and dropped to his knees, too.

“Baby,” Remus’ voice shook, fist quick on his own cock. He needed to come so bad.

Sirius just pushed at his shoulders, laying him back until he was against the carpet and Sirius had him fully in his mouth. He worked Remus with his mouth quickly, groaning around him, and Remus’ hips arched off the ground towards the heat. He came hard, forcing his eyes to stay open so he could watch Sirius.

They lay there for a moment, Sirius panting with his cheek against Remus’ hip, before he pushed himself up and positively beamed at Remus.

“Nice and clean,” he said, and surged up and kissed Remus. “I fucking love you.”

Remus wrapped his arms around Sirius’ neck and licked into his mouth. “I love you, I love you. You’re going to play so well.”

Sirius smiled into their next kiss, biting at Remus’ lower lip. “I am now.”

Sirius pulled back with a questioning noise when Remus started laughing into their next kiss.

“I’m sorry,” Remus laughed through the words, stroking his hands over Sirius’ cheeks. “It’s like an entire new experience kissing you with this thing.”

Sirius grinned and rubbed their cheeks together. “You like it a little bit, I know you do.”

Remus smiled into the kiss, but didn’t answer, instead carefully tucking Sirius back into his spandex and patting his butt. “See you out there, Captain.”

It was Sirius’ first home game back and playing. Instead of the normal pump up songs, the Lions’ had a special pre-game video on the jumbotron. When the lights went down, it played the first notes of Back in Black. At first the song’s notes were spaced out, remixed. It was hard to tell what the song was, echoing through the stadium. As soon as the crowd figured it out though, they went wild, and then an image of the back of Sirius’ jersey, slow-motioned, played of him walking down the darkened tunnel to the ice, his last name shining in glossy letters.

Dum.

Fast clips of Sirius’ tricky, skating feet.

Dum-da-dum.

A goal from the season, beautiful and impossible—until Sirius did it. Remus’ heart pounded.

Dum-a-dum.

The crowd recognized the song. Hogwarts roared.

Dum-a-dum-dum.

Remus laughed on the bench, popping a piece of gum in his mouth.

“Marlene’s a genius,” he shouted over the noise to Moody.

“She is,” he laughed gruffly.

The video continued with the rest of the team, highlights from the season and snippets of interviews. Finn and Logan crashing together after a goal. Leo’s bright blue eyes, focused from behind his mask. We’re ready, his accented voice said. We feel ready. James and Sirius’ famous one-two plays. Evgeni, mountainous and bear-like. Pascal and Logan. The French Canadian father and son, came Frank’s voice, and then the clip cut, bleeding together into a whole. Pascal and Sergei, helmets pressed together. Thomas, proud and tall, flipping a puck right between a goalies legs. Walkie-Talkie, walking the walk!

A waving rainbow flag being waved by numerous fans.

Remus felt tears building in the back of his throat. He wished he could see Sirius right then.

Frank’s voice over the speakers. Lions fans. Welcome to the Stanley Cup Finals.

He drew out the next words in the way he always did. Your Gryffin-dor Li-ons!

The Snakes skated out for warm-ups when the Lions did, insignificant and dark in their black away uniforms. When the lights came up, the Lions were out, Kasey raking up his crease and the others doing a lap on their side of the rink. Remus saw Snape’s eyes flick over from behind his visor, but that was all.

Arthur was bent over his calling card with some of the assistant coaches, motioning to various players.

“How does it feel?” Remus asked Kasey when he skated over to the bench for some water while Leo warmed up in goal, too.

“It feels good,” Kasey said. “It—”

James skated up fast and stopped hard. “Blue.”

Remus raised an eyebrow at him. “James, you ask me this ever game, I really don’t know how…” Remus trailed off and crossed his arms. “This is a superstitious thing. Isn’t it.”

James, looking only a little guilty, smiled. “Blue?”

Remus handed it to him. “You are all insane.”

“Bliz,” Leo said, opening the bench door. “You’re back in.”

Kasey tapped his butt with his blocker and skated back out.

“Is he okay?”

Remus looked back at James. He had his contacts in, adjusting one with a knuckle. “What?” Remus asked. “Who?”

James looked over to center ice where Sirius was tracing the Lions’ logo with a puck. Remus could see fans filming him—or maybe it was Kuny, down on the ice with his legs in the air, stretching.

“You know how Cap gets,” James said. “How much did he beat himself up over the last few nights?”

Remus sighed. “Oh, he tried to watch tape.”

James snorted. “Of course.”

“Didn’t let him, though. I all but wrestled him into bed—no.”

James’ face was already lit up.

“Not like that, Pots.”

James laughed loudly, reaching with his stick for a puck to take back out with him. “Sure, Loops, sure.”

Logan and Finn were standing near middle ice together, waiting for the wrap-around shoot. Logan was laughing at something Finn was saying. He took his helmet off and put it back on again, like he did with his hat.

“Cute, huh?” Leo said, and when Remus looked over at him, he grinned.

Remus laughed. “Proud of yourself?”

“Very.”

Remus found Sirius again. He was at the far side of the rink, pushing a stick over the glass for a little kid.

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

The horn went to signal the end of warm ups, and the team skated back towards the bench so that the ice crew could get rid of the shaved up ice.

Sirius jumped the boards in front of Remus, and Remus could already see the game taking over his expression. He was chewing the inside of his cheek, tapping various teammates and talking fast directions to them. Go hard here, ease off this, cover Malfoy on the power play…

When the lights went down for the national anthem, it felt sudden. Remus’ heart jumped in his chest. Sirius glanced at Remus as he pulled his twelve necklace out from within his jersey, smiling before bowing his head and holding the pendant to his lips. Finn had his hand on Logan’s shoulder, Logan was holding his necklace, Leo was behind both of them, close and shuffling from skate to skate.

Remus looked over to the Snake’s bench. They were still. Their eyes were ahead. He thought about Regulus, up in the Lions box with the other families, looking down at the red and green. He wondered, not for this first time, if Sirius’ parents were here. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t want Sirius looking for them, even subconsciously.

Things didn’t get interesting until halfway through the second period. The Snakes were mirroring Sirius’ line, calling Snape’s out whenever Sirius jumped the boards. Malfoy was on him like a magnet, hammering him into the boards and getting penalties called on himself for slashing.

“What kind of fucking strategy is this?” Finn said before climbing back out onto the ice for their fourth power play of the period. Sirius was circling with one of the refs, talking with his hands, his mouthguard in one of his palms.

“Alright, boys!” James yelled. “Alright, alright, here we go!”

Not single goal had yet to be scored and the crowd was anxious for one, shouting at every moment a Lion was close to Riddle’s net.

Sirius, seemingly giving up on the referee, set up across center ice from Snape. He spat something that made Severus sneer and Remus—Remus couldn’t deny that it sent a new wave of heat through him. Sirius was all hockey now, and his eyes were on the Cup. The Stanley Cup wasn’t in the building yet, it was too soon, but it would be. Remus’ throat got tight when he thought about it. He’d never been this close. He never thought he’d ever be this close.

The puck dropped. Sirius scooped it back to Finn and darted into the Snakes’ zone, wrestling against Malfoy still. He shouted for James but Snape intercepted the pass, sudden and sloppy in his strokes, and carried it back to the center zone. Malfoy, though, was too busy with Sirius. The puck went careening towards the boards, momentarily alone, before Finn was there, catching it and carrying it towards Riddle. He faked once, weight on his toes, twice, and then shot it above Riddle’s left shoulder. The goal horn blared in red lights. His hands went up and so did Sirius’. Logan shouted from beside Remus on the bench.

“Fuck, Harzy,” he said, and Leo and him shared a smile.

Remus clapped with Hogwarts, glancing up at the jumbotron to see the score change from 0-0 to 1-0. Finn jumped the boards and Logan pressed their helmets together in the split moment that they met while leaving and getting onto the ice. Finn was sweaty and grinning.

“That’s what we’re doing,” Thomas shouted. “That’s what we’re doing.”

Sirius stayed out and Remus smiled. He wanted a goal, Remus could tell. He and James circled each other as they talked, heads close together so the others couldn’t hear or read their lips.

Remus patted Finn’s shoulder. “Good getting us going, Harz.”

“I’m good at getting boys going, Loops.”

Remus snorted and Leo shoved him.

Riddle was making a slow lap around the crease, eyes on Finn on their bench, then moving over, all the way across the ice, to Kasey, re-setting, too.

Remus looked between them, and when he returned to Riddle, he saw that he was spitting words at Snape and pointing to Kasey.

The lights changed, calling a TV break.

“Mon loup, c’est bon?” Sirius said. He put a foot up on the boards, stretching.

Remus hesitated, then nodded. “I—yeah. Your ankle? Is it stiff?”

“Non, just stretching,” Sirius smiled. “Worrier.”

“Hey,” Remus tried to smile back, but he was watching Kasey approach the bench. “Hey, Kase—”

“I saw it, too, Loops,” Kasey said, squirting some water into his mouth and glancing over at Riddle. “Believe me. That guy’s eyes practically glow like the ones on his mask.”

“Just watch out for any bad plays,” Coach said. “That goes for everyone.”

“I mean,” Kasey shrugged. “If he tries to get a goal by ramming into me, it’ll be no goal.”

“I’m not worried about the goal, Bliz,” Coach said. “I’m worried about you.”

One corner of Kasey’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Well, shucks, Coach.”

“Alright,” Coach nodded. “Let’s be careful and play hard.”

There was a chorus of yes, coach, and Pascal’s line went out for the face-off.

“What exactly did you see Snape and Riddle do?” Sirius asked, back in the locker room. He was smiling and wearing the Lions hat token that Logan had given to him after Sirius scored two goals in the third. They had won game two 4-2. The series was tied for now.

“Nothing really,” Remus was bent beside him by James, taping up a sore calf. “It was a look but…”

“But that’s all it really takes with Riddle,” James said. “Thanks Loops, that feels better.”

“Go easy on it, no running on the plane.”

“I don’t do that!”

“Yes, you really do.”

“Well, I am a responsible father now.”

“I didn’t see them try anything,” Sirius said, glancing over at Kasey. “But I’m not sure that makes me feel better.”

Remus sighed, running a hand over Sirius’ knee and using it to push himself up. “Me neither. But, hey.”

Sirius looked up at him, and Remus tilted the brim of the hat back so he could lean down for a quick kiss. “We won.”

“Lupin love,” Thomas shouted.

Remus laughed. “Do you need something, Walker?”

“Sirius!”

Remus didn’t have time to look behind him before Julian was barreling into his back, arms around his waist and gazing at Sirius.

“Those goals were so good.”

Sirius smiled. “Thanks, Jules. Wanna wear the hat?”

“Really?”

James leaned in. “Be warned of the countless sweaty heads that has adorned. We can’t wash it.”

“I wanna wear it!”

Sirius placed the hat on Julian’s head while the other families filed in. Remus saw Alex give his brother a tight hug, Leo’s dad going up to clap Logan on the back. Kris’ daughter went running to him, and he scooped her up with kisses. Julian had become fast friends with Regulus and was running to show him his hat where he was standing with Leo.

Sirius rose, locking his hands around Remus’ lower back. “Want to come cool down with me?”

Remus smiled, palms on his chest. “Oh, we’ll cool down, will we?”

“Yeah,” Sirius pressed a kiss to Remus’ cheek, beard dragging against his skin. “You know. Relax all of our tense muscles.”

Remus wound his fingers in Sirius’ sweaty hair. “I love you. Go shower.”

Sirius pressed a last, soft kiss to Remus’ mouth. “Don’t leave without me.”

“Never.”

Sirius’ house was warm and quiet when Hope unlocked the door.

Hope turned to Sirius once they were inside. “I made some spaghetti for you, Sirius, I thought you might be hungry.”

Sirius laughed. “Hope, tu es un ange.”

“He said you’re an angel,” Remus smiled. “And he’s right.”

“Remus makes the best post-game sandwiches,” Sirius pulled him close. “I guess I have you to thank for that.”

“Oh, no, that’d be Lyall,” Hope smiled, pulling a covered dish out of the refrigerator and turning to the microwave. “Lyall and Remus always made sandwiches together after his games.”

“And me,” Julian said, sliding into a chair at the kitchen table. “Right dad?”

“Every game,” Lyall smiled. “Best part of my day, bud.”

“Can I go skate, mom?”

“Julian Lupin, you are going right to bed. Do you know what time it is? I’ll let you miss school for this, and your bedtime, but there is a line, darling.”

“But we’re having spaghetti.”

Hope raised an eyebrow. “Did you just play a full game of hockey?”

Julian sighed. “No.”

“Okay then,” Hope stroked Julian’s hair. “Go get ready for bed, okay? Take dad with you.”

“C’mon, J, we’ll watch some of the post-game.”

Remus watched Julian and his dad trudge upstairs then turned to Hope. “Mom, let me do that. We have a long flight tomorrow again. Why don’t you go rest up, too?”

Hope looked between them and laughed, understanding. “Well, if you insist. I’ll just leave you two alone then. My son the chef, that’s new!”

Remus snorted. “It was new, like, four years ago!”

Hope smiled and kissed Remus on the cheek, then Sirius. “See you two tomorrow.”

When the microwave beeped, they shared the bowl with two forks, ankles tangled below the table.

“Are you really worried?” Sirius said after a few beats of silence. He twirled his fork in the noodles and held it out to Remus. “About Kasey. About Snape.”

Remus took Sirius’ fork gently into his mouth. “I don’t know. I know he’s worried. He’s nervous about his thigh. I can tell. It’s like you, early on with your ankle. Timid.”

Sirius nodded slowly. “Do you think I should talk to him?”

Remus shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt. Kasey’s strong, but it’s always good to hear you’re good.”

Sirius’ smile was sly, if not a little sleepy. “So I learned today.”

Remus smiled. “Eat so we can sleep. You frickin sweetheart.”

Sirius laughed and pulled the bowl towards him to scrape the last of the noodles towards him and into his mouth. After putting it in the sink, he bent over the back of Remus’ chair, arms across Remus’ chest.

“Bed?”

Remus tilted his head back for a kiss. “Bed.”

~

Slytherin was cold and the Snakes were vicious. Remus looked up at the second period clock running down as he prodded at Sirius’ left shoulder. Sirius was breathing heavily, Moody holding cotton to his bleeding nose.

Malfoy was in a similar state, being led to the the penalty box.

“Finally got tired of him being all over you, eh?” Remus said, then, more firmly, and loudly to be heard over the Slytherin crowd, “Do you have to go back to the locker room with me?”

“Non,” Sirius yelled, batting Moody’s hand away and swiping his own across his nose. The bleeding had stopped. “I’m good, allez.”

Remus nodded, replacing Sirius’ shoulder pad and pulling his jersey back down over his shoulder and arm. “All right, go.”

“Love you,” Sirius breathed, and then hopped the boards to go to the penalty box. Remus couldn’t help but smile a little as he watched him and Malfoy spit words at each other through the glass.

Coach leaned in. “He okay?”

Remus nodded. “He’s fine.” He looked back over at the penalty box, at Malfoy inside. “Blondie’s really not gonna leave him alone this whole series, huh?”

“That’s their way,” Coach grumbled. “Stick on you like leeches. Sirius knows how to handle it.”

Evgeni and Jackson made their way back onto the bench.

“Just take your time, the word will come to you,” Jackson was saying. “Kuns, you can’t get frustrated like that.”

Evgeni grumbled something in Russian and Jackson just nodded along.

“Nado, score goal,” he ended with.

“I’m trying.”

They were down three nothing, and Remus looked back at Kasey. He was tense, in his own head. Remus would give anything to be able to talk to him.

The puck dropped, Logan on the face-off. They were four-on-four, Sirius leaning forward in the box, probably hoping for a jack-in-the-box goal. Snape carried the puck in easily, past Olli, deking around Pascal only to be crushed to the boards by Timmy. He lost it for a second, but Logan flubbed a pass and then it was on Carrow’s stick.

“Shit,” Remus swore under his breath.

Carrow was a ruthless, fast skater. He pushed towards Kasey, closer and closer.

Despite everything, Remus wasn’t expecting him to ram into Kasey, disregarding the puck entirely, and knocking them both into the net.

The goal horn blared and Carrow didn’t even look up as he skated off the ice and down the tunnel. He knew he was too dirty to be allowed back in the game. Some of his team members patted him on the back. Remus felt sick.

Remus leaped up—and Kasey stayed down. The ref was blowing the whistle hard.

“Fucking interference!” James shouted, voice breaking with how much he had been at it. “Fuck!”

Kasey hit the ice with his stick as he rose, slowly. So slowly.

Sure enough, the referee skated out, hands in a cross, signaling that there was no goal.

Just as suddenly, the crowd started to sing. At least, at first Remus thought it was singing. Then, he recognized the sound.

“Winter,” the crowd was saying in a long, drawn out drone. It was haunting. It was over and over again.

Winter, Winter.

They were taunting him. Kasey was lapping his goal. He was favoring one leg. He was keeping his head down.

“Coach,” Remus said quietly. “Coach, he’s hurt.”

“Let’s see what he does,” Coach said. “Let’s see, Kasey’s not reckless.”

“He might be if the entire crowd is taunting him into it.”

“We have ten seconds left. He can last ten seconds.”

“We’ll keep it away from him,” Thomas said. His eyes were dark. “Jesus, Kase.”

The ten seconds went, and the end of the second period rang out.

Kasey was down on one knee in his crease, head bowed. Then, he lifted his gaze and looked right at Remus. Remus could only just make out his brown eyes through his mask. Kasey gave a slight shake of his head.

Walking back down the tunnel was a blur. Sirius was holding his hand until they had to part ways. Remus looked up at a TV as he passed and stopped when he saw himself. It was the moment from earlier. He had his hands up Sirius’ jersey, checking his shoulder, while Sirius had his head turned close to him, mid-sentence, blood dripping down his face.

“Black and Lupin, close on the bench this game,” the show host was saying and Remus scoffed. “And what looked like a bad hit on Lions starting goalie, Kasey Winter, by the Snakes tonight. Lucky for the Lions, they don’t have too bad a rookie. Nineteen year old Leo Knut, Louisiana born…”

Remus kept walking, pushing open the door to the quiet room where Kasey was waiting for him on his back on the exam table. He had his bad leg stretched out.

“Hi Kase,” Remus said softly.

Kasey had an arm over his eyes, and he pulled it away slowly. “Hi, Loops.”

“You okay? Can I get you some water or a bar or something?”

Kasey shook his head. “No. Let’s just—let’s get this over with. Just tell me.”

Remus bit his lip, but nodded. “Okay. I’m gonna take your shorts off, alright?”

Kasey nodded, and Remus worked quietly until he was stripped to his underarmour and Remus could feel his strong muscles and tendons. Remus was gentle and quick. Kasey wasn’t a player who liked things sugar coated.

“Well?” Kasey asked in a rough voice.

“It—it has a light tear, I think,” Remus said softly, and Kasey closed his eyes. “I need you to rest Kase. Don’t think I haven’t seen you pushing yourself. I know it’s frustrating.”

“Barely,” Kasey grit out. “I’ve been barely pushing myself. It’s—it’s just not—”

There was a knock at the door, making them both look up.

Natalie poked her head in, and the moment Kasey saw her he pressed a palm over his eyes and sucked in a sharp breath of tears.

“Kase,” Natalie was rushing forward, the door falling shut behind her. She rubbed a palm over his chest, the other in his hair. “Hey, baby, you’re all right.” She kissed his forehead. “You’re all right.”

“I’ll give you two a second,” Remus said quietly, and she nodded.

“Thanks, Re.”

Remus felt overly hot and heavy when the door closed behind him. The hallway looked busy and loud with staff members.

“Remus.”

Remus turned at Arthur’s voice, meeting worried, stern eyes.

“Tell me,” Arthur said.

“These injuries are tricky,” Remus managed. “They’re easily aggravated and…”

“And I should get Knut warmed up?”

“Yes,” Remus said, even though it hurt. “Yes.”

Arthur pressed his lips together and they stood there for a moment, the chaos around them.

“I’m going to go see Bliz,” Arthur said. “Tell him he’s good.”

“Natalie’s in there. I think you should give him a minute.”

Arthur nodded. “Okay. Go see the boys. I’m coming back in five to go over strategy.”

“Okay,” Remus managed a tight smile, and headed for the locker room.

Sirius was on him in a moment, sweaty and stripped down to his pads and socks.

“No, it isn’t good,” Remus said before he could ask. “Where is Leo?”

“Warming up,” Sirius said. “Fuck. Re—”

“Loops?”

It was Evgeni.

“Blizzard is okay?” he asked. The rest of the locker room quieted to listen.

Remus shook his head. “He’s okay but he’s done for the season.”

Remus turned to Sirius and took his hand. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Sirius said. “Are you?”

“I feel horrible,” Remus said. “I should have watched him closer, I should have—I knew how hard he was being on himself, I’ve been there.”

“Re, this isn’t your fault. Did you see that hit? Carrow’s out of the game and he’s gonna get a suspension for that. It was completely insane.”

“They’ll just replace him with Bones. You know they will, that’s their whole strategy. They don’t care how hard the hit is—”

“They don’t care about their players,” Regulus cut in. He was standing with Pascal and offered a humorless smile. “Whatever makes the game easier.”

“And yet their motto is always pure hockey,” Pascal shook his head.

“I need to find Leo.”

“He’s with Finn and Logan by the bikes,” Regulus said.

Remus nodded, pressed a palm to Sirius’ cheek, and then turned away.

Leo was stretched out on the floor in his spandex, Logan and Finn talking with him as they kept their muscles warm on the bikes. They looked up when Remus entered.

“Is Nut in?” Finn asked.

“Yes.”

Leo sat up. “Is Kasey…” but he trailed off at Remus’ expression. “Fuck.”

“Bliz,” Logan sighed, raking his fingers through his sweaty hair before hanging his head, elbows on the bike handlebars and feet slow. It had been Logan’s missed pass.

“It isn’t your fault, Tremz. We just have to hope for the best. But get warm, Leo, okay? You can see him after.”

Leo nodded. “Okay. Not my first play off game or anything. No pressure. At least my family is here.” Leo let out a long breath and touched his forehead to his knees. “My mama would cry if she missed this.”

Remus looked to Finn and Logan. “You guys good?”

Finn nodded. “Yeah, Loops, we’re good.”

Remus pushed back into the hallway, hoping to go back to Kasey, only to be met by Alice. He tried to duck out, but she walked with him.

“Coach says he’s in,” she said, gesturing to the door closing on the cubs. “He told me to come to you for news on Kasey.”

“Slight tear in the adductor longus,” Remus said as they walked down the hall. When Alice just gave him a look, Remus sighed. “Inner thigh.”

“So, his repeating injury.”

“Yes, but,” Remus stopped, hand on her shoulder. They were at the locker room. “Do me a favor, and don’t put that in the press statement. I don’t want him hearing that right now.”

Alice’s expression softened. “You’re good to them, Lupin.”

Remus was already pushing open the door. “They’re good to me.”

Out on the ice, Leo was met by hisses and jeering. Finn and Logan kept close to his side while he marked him his crease, circling and tapping his posts.

Moody chuckled from beside Remus. “Not superstitious, eh?”

Remus patted Sirius’ shoulder. “That can only last so long when you’re around this one twenty-four seven.”

Sirius turned. “Quoi?”

“Nothing,” Remus said, and shared a knowing look with Moody.

“Where’s Bliz?” James asked.

“Watching with Natalie and his family in the recovery room,” Remus said. “He’ll be okay, you guys focus. Win this game for him.”

Remus looked out at Leo, at Pascal on the face-off.

The referee dropped the puck, and the third period of game three began.

[raiseyourcups]

Cabur

Chapter Twenty

Pairing: Din Djarin x OFC (Aili Verdella) Warnings: cursing, vague threats of bodily harm Word Count: 4.1k Also on AO3

Masterlist//Main Masterlist

Summary: Karga takes Mando, Aili, and Cara into Nevarro where there's more than they bargained for waiting for them. Too bad even Karga couldn't foresee exactly what he was bringing them into.

As soon as the sun rose, they broke down the campsite and continued on the walk towards town. Kuiil was on the last remaining blurrg, bringing up the rear of their group. Aili narrowed her eyes at Karga and his two remaining hunters putting distance between their group. She didn’t like that they were speaking low and out of earshot. 

“Either of you think they’re having second thoughts?” Cara asked, quietly enough that only Mando and Aili could hear her. 

“Could be,” Mando spoke first. 

Aili tilted her head to the side a little as she took in the three people walking in front of their group, “Karga, maybe. Those two, no.” 

“Keep your guards up,” Mando said shortly. He didn’t like this anymore than Aili did but he had a little more hope after the kid had healed Karga. Now he just had to hope that Karga was right about his hunters being loyal to him and him only. 

“Always do,” Aili replied, a little surprised that Mando thought she hadn’t had her guard up from the moment they first stepped foot on Nevarro.

At some point during their walk, the hunters that Karga had brought ended up behind Mando, Aili, Cara, and Little Green’s cradle. They were now only behind Karga while Kuiil was still at the far rear. Aili didn’t like that at all and chose to keep her hand hovering above her blaster holster. She didn’t like not knowing what they had been talking about with Karga.

Karga came to a stop by a drop in the lava fields and Aili tensed up without meaning to. She tried to ease the tension in her shoulders, letting out a deep breath to calm herself down. It would be easier to protect herself and Little Green if she wasn’t tense. 

"So I guess this is it," Karga spoke with a sigh. With a speed that not even Aili was prepared for, Karga pulled out both of his blasters and shot the bounty hunters that he had brought with him. Even as she, Mando, and Cara unholstered their own and pointed them at him. Karga held his blasters towards the sky to let them know he wasn’t about to shoot them. 

“There’s something you should know,” Karga spoke as he walked past the three of them, holstering his weapons even as his back was to them. He kicked one of the men over before kicking his blaster out of his hand and towards Mando’s feet. “The plan was to kill you both and take the kid.”

“I kriffin’ knew this was a trap but this is low even for you Karga,” Aili said, her own blaster still pointing at him along with Mando and Cara’s blasters. No one made a move to shoot yet, all of them with a little too much honor to shoot a man who didn’t have his own blasters out anymore. Karga was lucky that Aili had spent the better part of five years learning to ask questions first and shoot after rather than the other way around. 

“After what happened last night though, I couldn’t go through with it.” He threw his arms out to the side, with three blasters still training on him. “Go on, you can gun me down now and it wouldn’t violate the Code. But if you do, this child will never be safe.”

Cara seemed to be waiting for a signal from either Mando or Aili, looking at each of them before focusing back on Karga. Neither of them had so much as twitched, staring down Karga in Aili’s case although it was easy to tell that Mando was doing the same. At some point Kuiil had caught up to them and had come down from his blurrg, watching as the now one-sided standoff continued. 

“The Imperial client is obsessed with obtaining this asset. You tried to run but where did that get you?” Karga questioned.

Aili held back from mentioning the weeks they had spent on Sorgan. She wasn't stupid enough to sell out one of few places they could probably run back to without hunters following for a small amount of time. But Karga was right, they couldn't run forever. Especially when jobs outside the Guild were never a guarantee.

Cara let out a scoff, “This is ridiculous.”

“Perhaps you should let him speak,” Kuiil said, once again being the voice of reason among them all.

“Listen, we all need the client to be eliminated. Let me take the child to him and then you two--”

“Not going to happen,” Aili interrupted before Karga could continue. That was a shit plan and Karga knew that none of them would go for it. She didn’t know why he would even suggest it in the first place. But she knew he was also right, they couldn’t just leave Nevarro now. As much as it pained her to admit even to just herself.

“Let’s just kill him and get outta here,” Cara said bluntly.

“We can’t do that either,” Aili said, looking over at Mando who thankfully turned to look at her. Without speaking they had as much of a conversation as they could when one of them was wearing a helmet.

“He’s right,” Mando said as he turned back towards Karga, lowering his blaster at the same time as Aili. Now it was only Cara still keeping her blaster trained on Karga. She turned her head slightly to look at both Mando and Aili like they were crazy when they holstered their blasters. 

“What are you two doing?”

“As long as the Imp lives, he’ll send hunters after the Child,” Karga said. He knew that both Mando and Aili would know he was speaking the truth about that at the very least. They had been in the Guild, they knew how some clients would not rest until they had their quarry. Had both been given pucks for bounties that several hunters couldn’t catch, the reward going up with every failure. 

“It’s a trap,” Cara said slowly, hoping that either Mando or Aili would see that they were being crazy. Trusting the words of a man who had just admitted to planning their deaths not even five minutes ago. 

“Bring us in,” Aili said, ignoring Cara completely. 

Karga was taken aback, not expecting that to be Aili’s plan. He was unsure he had heard her correctly. “What do you mean?”

“Tell him you captured us, get us close to him and one of us will kill him,” Mando spoke next, seeing where Aili was going with her idea. He didn’t agree with it completely and planned to change it within the next few minutes. Just like she had done back on Sorgan. 

“That’s a good idea. Give me your blasters," Karga requested. Mando and Aili were both quick to do so even as Cara looked at them like they were crazy. 

“This is insane. Did you two lose brain cells when you fucked each other?” Cara didn’t mean to sound so harsh or to let everyone know what had happened between the two bounty hunters. But this plan of theirs was crazy, a one way ticket to dying or being imprisoned by Imps. 

If Karga was taken aback by Cara's statement he didn't let it show on his face. Aili still picked up on a minute twitch in one of his eyebrows though which gave away his surprise. She guessed he hadn't expected that to ever happen given their first meeting. 

Aili let out a huff of something akin to laughter before speaking, “That’s not a thing and I've only had the one minor concussion.”

“It’s also the only way,” Mando added.

“Well, I’m coming with you,” Cara stated, her tone not leaving room for argument. 

“No, no, no. That would make them suspicious,” Karga replied, he was trying to keep the Rebel from shooting him but he couldn’t see a way to get her into town without raising suspicions. They would spot her from a parsec away and then there would be blaster shots from every direction. 

“I don’t care. I’m coming.”

“Look, just tell them she caught us. We let our guard down and she used one of us as leverage to catch the other,” Aili said, quickly becoming more annoyed with the amount of time they were wasting. Every second they spent trying to figure out a plan, the more time they gave for any scouts (she wasn’t stupid enough to think this Imp only had a fire team with him) to have them in their sights. After that and it wouldn’t matter what kind of plan they decided on. 

“Fine. Then she can bring the Child,” Karga stated.

“No, the kid goes back to the ship,” Mando said.

“But without the Child, none of this works!” Karga was surprised that Mando wouldn’t know that already. The Client would want to see the Child to know that they weren’t pulling a fast one on him. As much as he was now asking for the capture of Mando and Aili, his main focus was still the Child. 

“I have a different plan,” Mando said suddenly, which was news to Aili. He turned to look at her and she was aleady ready to argue against whatever stupid thing came out if his mouth. “Ride back to the Razor Crest with Kuiil and the Child and seal yourselves in. When you’re inside, engage ground security protocols. Nothing on this planet will breach those doors.”

“Um, one problem, I’m not letting you do this on your own,” Aili turned to Kuiil before Mando could even start with her. “I trust you to take the kid and do what he said. He’s right about the doors, nothing will get past them.”

"Mando, you may have slighted the Client but they know about Aili as well and want her brought in too. They were quite clear on that.” Karga spoke before Mando could argue with Aili’s quick dismissal of his alternate plan. 

"How do they know?” Mando questioned, his tone clipped even through his voice modulator. 

"Imps aren't stupid, they still have eyes and ears everywhere," Alli stated, raising a single brow as she turned to look Mando in his t-visor. She wasn't dumb enough to hope that she could sneak away and leave Mando to his fate. Imps always knew when another "asset" was involved. All it took was one person on any of the planets they had been to saying something within earshot of an Empire sympathizer and the news would get back to someone she would rather didn’t know her whereabouts.

They stared at each other for a long moment before Mando let out a deep sigh. “Fine. Kuiil will go back to the ship alone with the kid.”

“Here’s a comlink. I will keep the Child safe,” Kuiil said, looking at Aili first and then Mando before nodding and turning to look at Cara. “Don’t forget to cover your stripes.”

“Let’s go,” Mando said, pulling his stun cuffs from his belt and handing them to Karga who placed them on his wrists quickly. Aili pulled her own cuffs out and passed them to Cara, holding her wrists out in front of her. 

Karga cleared his throat awkwardly to catch their attention. "Sorry, they were quite clear that your hands should be bound from behind if caught." 

Aili stared at Karga for a long moment, slowly counting to ten in her head. But she slowly moved her hands behind her back and turned around to let Cara fasten them. She tried not to flinch when she felt the cuffs being placed on her wrists. She didn't succeed but no one was stupid enough to make a comment. 

This hadn't been part of the deal at all. And once again Aili was left wondering who exactly they were dealing with. Not many would know to make sure to make it as difficult as possible for her to fight back. 

Mando and Aili watched as Cara took out a strip of cloth to cover her stripes, Kuiil checked over his own comlink, and Karga pulled out both of his blasters again, making sure they weren’t pointing at anyone just yet. Kuiil walked over and picked Little Green up from his cradle. Aili waited half a second before quietly calling for Kuiil to wait a moment. She walked forward, ignoring the look she got from Karga and she looked down at Little Green as best as she could since kneeling was not an option if she wanted to stand back up on her own. 

“We’re going to be right back, I promise,” she kept her voice low enough only for Kuiil and Little Green to hear. She didn’t need Mando or Cara or even Karga commenting on how soft she had gotten. She could still kick every single one of their asses. Little Green made a quiet cooing sound, his ears going back as he looked up at Aili. She tried to give him a reassuring smile but she knew it was more of a grimace. 

With one last nod, she moved back to Mando’s side and Kuiil continued his walk back to the blurrg. Little Green staring at the rest of them from over the Ugnaught’s shoulder. With a deep sigh, they started the walk into town, a now closed and empty cradle floating behind them. 

The closer they got to town, the worse the feeling in Aili’s gut got. It was about to burst when they reached the entrance of town and she could see the troopers stationed at the gate with even more walking around beyond. That was already more than a fireteam and she shared a quick glance with Mando. One of the scout troopers got up and walked towards them lazily. 

“Chain code?” 

“I have a gift for the boss,” Karga said, gesturing slightly to his captives. “Several gifts, in fact.”

“Chain code.” The trooper repeated, not caring in the slightest what Karga had just said. Karga sighed before passing along the chain code to the trooper who scanned it twice before looking back up. “I’ll give you twenty credits for the helmet.”

Karga laughed, only sounding a little forced to Aili’s ears. “Not a chance! That’s going on my wall.”

“On your wall?” Mando muttered as lowly as he could. 

“Go with it,” Karga replied back just as quietly.

“Shut up, both of you.” Aili harshly whispered, still counting how many troopers she could see in town. Then she took stock of the weapons that they had brought with them. It wouldn’t be as easy as they had planned or hoped for, that was for certain now. 

“Go ahead,” the scout trooper said, handing Karga back the chain code and moved a little to the side to let them all pass. 

“You said there were four troopers," Cara attempted to keep her voice as low as possible. They didn't need to get any of the troopers attention any more than they already had.

“There are way more than that, Karga,” Aili added.

“Four guarding the Client. Many more here in town. Things got really heated once Mando crashed the safehouse.” Karga explained as if that made up for his white lie.

“I don’t care about semantics,” Aili replied harshly. All she knew was that Karga had told them there was only a four person fire team while conveniently leaving out the fact that there were more in town surrounding them.

“Slip him his blaster, I’ll slip Aili hers," Cara suggested despite the fact that Aili wouldn't be able to use her blaster. Not with her hands behind her back still although that would be impressive. 

“Not yet." Karga kept moving towards the cantina where they used to do business. Aili almost missed it, almost. “Here we are.”

The door opened without fanfare and Karga pushed Mando in first, Cara following behind him with a loose hand wrapped around Aili’s upper arm. True to his word, there were only four troopers in the cantina. Four troopers and the Client who stood at the sight of Mando and Karga.  

“Look what I brought you. As promised.” 

The Client's gaze went from Mando to Aili and the closed cradle beside them. “And so the Mandalorian is captured along with a bonus prize.” 

The Client was everything that made Aili remember how much she hated the Empire. Even when she was doing their dirty work, she had hated every moment but didn’t see any other options other than dying. And that option had been taken off the table once she had decided she was done killing children for them but couldn't stand the thought of leaving them behind.

Seeing the way this man was looking at her was enough to make her stand up taller and stare him down like she had much higher ranked men. The fact that her hands were cuffed behind her was inconsequential, she didn't need her hands to take down a few troopers. 

“What exquisite craftsmanship,” the Client said, reaching forward but not quite touching Mando’s armor. “It is amazing how beautiful beskar can be when forged by its ancestral artisans. Can I offer you a libation to celebrate the closing of our shared narrative?”

“I would be obliged.”

The Client gestured for the droid behind the bar to pour drinks before he turned back to the group. “Please sit.”

Karga pushed Mando forward a little and he shuffled onto the seat with as much dignity as he could with his hands bound. Karga sat down beside him which would hopefully make slipping him his blaster easier. Aili didn’t even attempt to sit, standing in front of Cara who was ready to help uncuff her as soon as she could. They didn’t expect more troopers to come into the cantina on some unseen orders.

The Client let out the fakest sigh that Aili had ever heard in her life. “It is a shame that your people suffered so. Just as in this situation, it was all avoidable.

“Why did Mandalore resist our expansion? The Empire improves every system it touches. Judge by any metric. Safety, prosperity, trade, opportunity, peace. Compare Imperial rule to what is happening now.”

Aili couldn’t stop the scoff that escaped her mouth. “Do you even hear yourself talk? You speak of safety but for who, the so-called Emperor? Prosperity? Half the planets that were under Imperial rule were full of slaves. Peace, what was peace during those times?”

“Ah, so the Dragon can still speak," the Client said, looking over at Aili for the first time since they had first entered the building.

“Yeah I wasn’t one of the ones who lost their tongues," Aili said, making sure to bare her teeth as she gave the Client her best fake smile. She’d let the others figure out for themselves if she was joking or not. Which she wasn’t, unfortunately. 

“A pity and an error that can still be corrected," the Client said shortly. Mando tensed up in his seat not liking what the man in front of him was implying. He wished he had his blaster already so they could get this over with.

“I’d like to see you try."

Cara gave Aili a small shove to try to get her to shut up which she allowed for now. But she was still silently fuming, itching for her blaster so she could permanently shut up the Imp before them. 

“Is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death and chaos,” the Client continued his speech as if he hadn’t just been interrupted. He finally looked over at Karga. “I would like to see the baby.”

“Um, it is asleep,” Karga said, reaching forward to stop the Client from opening the cradle. 

“We all will be quiet. Open the pram.”

Karga stared at the Client with an unreadable expression on his face. He was saved from having to say or do anything for a moment when one of the troopers stepped forward to speak to the Client. There was radio chatter that no one could clearly hear and then the Client stood up. Karga stood at the same time, hand still hovering above the empty cradle.

“Don’t think me to be rude. I must take this call.”

As the Client walked away to where a trooper was setting up a holoprojector, Mando removed his stun cuffs. Aili did the same as quietly as she could, keeping a hold of them so they didn’t fall and catch anyone’s attention. 

“Give me the blaster,” Mando whispered. Karga did so without question. 

“This is bad, you said four,” Cara said, leaning down as casually as she could to speak to Karga. 

“Well there are more. What can I tell you?

The Client opened the call and Aili struggled to see who was on the other end. It wasn’t easy nor could she really hear anything. She didn’t get a chance to try to see or hear more when there were suddenly shots coming from the windows, hitting the Client and the troopers in the cantina. Mando flipped the table as fast as he could, reaching out to pull Aili behind it. Karga and Cara took cover as well, as shots continued to rain down on the room. Cara took the chance to pass Aili her blaster back.

There was a break in the shots and after a few seconds of silence, Cara moved from behind the table to take cover behind a wall to the left wall of the cantina. Mando and Aili went towards the right while Karga went behind a wall just behind them. They all took the risk to glance out from behind cover to see troopers in all black lined up outside the window. 

Aili turned back around, almost slamming her head back against the wall behind her. She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped that she was seeing things. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” 

Death troopers never meant anything good. She didn’t have to look to hear the sounds of a transport moving in, nor did she have to look to hear even more troopers arrive outside the cantina. 

“This is bad," Cara said simply like they didn't already know that.

Mando brought up the comlink that Kuiil had given him earlier. “Kuiil? Are you back to the ship yet?”

"Are you there? Do you copy?” He tried again when Kuiil didn't respond as quickly as he would have liked. 

“Yes!”

“Are you back to the ship yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Get back to the ship and bail. Get the kid out of here. We’re pinned down!”

As if things weren’t already fucked, Aili heard the familiar sound of a TIE fighter coming in and landing nearby. She chanced a glance around Mando and watched as a man walked past the troopers who made way for him. As soon as she laid eyes on him she wished that she hadn't because now she knew how fucked they were. 

“You have something I want.” The man started to speak, knowing they could hear him perfectly without him raising his voice more than necessary. Knew they would now be hanging on his every word to try to figure out who they were up against. 

“Who’s this guy?” Cara asked. If they weren’t in such deep shit, Aili would have laughed at the way she said it. But this really wasn’t the time to laugh, not when there was a Moff coming their way. From beside her, Mando had gone stiff and she wondered if he was aware of who their true enemy was as well. 

“You may think you have some idea of what you are in possession of, but you do not.”

“Kuiil, are you back to the ship yet? They’re onto us!” Mando waited a few seconds for a response before trying again. “Kuiil, come in!”

“In a few moments, it will be mine.”

Aili wished that she had brought a sniper rifle, she could take out this Moff and then they’d see how many troopers would scatter. Then it would just be a matter of taking out the ones who stayed. Anything to make this day go by faster.

“Kuiil, do you copy? Kuiil!"

“It means more to me than you will ever know.”

“Kuiil! Are you there? Come in, Kuiil!”

“Mando, why isn’t he answering?” Aili questioned, eyes wide. Mando wasn’t sure if the emotion in them was more fear or anger. Maybe it was a mixture of both which wasn’t something he thought he had ever seen in Aili’s eyes. The fear reminded him of when she had the concussion and didn’t know where the kid was. 

He wished that he could give her an answer but he didn't have one. He kept trying to hail Kuiil on the comlink, sounding more and more desperate for a response as there continued to be no response. 

They had known this was a trap, they just hadn't known how well thought out it really was. And now they had to reap the consequences and hope they came out of this with their lives.

[everwitch-magiks]

dance with somebody (ch. 19)

start from ch. 1 | back to ch. 18

Dex drives him to the airport.

Even though it's still too fucking early o'clock, Whiskey feels wide awake. He didn’t think he would – it’s not exactly like he got an abundance of sleep, last night. He’s supposed to be joining the Aeros for their practice, right after lunch, and unfortunately, he highly doubts this nervous energy is going to last him until then.

Whiskey closes his eyes, breathes in and out. It’s fine. It will be fine. Somehow.

"Hey," Dex says carefully.

"I'm okay." Whiskey forces his eyes back open. "Thank you for doing this. I’m so sorry it had to be this fucking early."

"No problem," Dex tells him firmly. "Just remember – if you need to get out of there, for any reason, don’t hesitate to call. Alright? I promise I’ll drive right down and rescue you.”

Somehow, that actually makes Whiskey smile.

"Sure. It's literally on the other side of the country, but sure."

"Just a few hours behind the wheel," Dex replies decisively, almost like it could truly be that simple. Like he actually means it. "Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you talked to Jack, yet?"

Wait. What?

"Zimmermann?" Whiskey asks doubtfully, and watches in disbelief as Dex nods. "Why would I… Dex, I don't actually know Jack Zimmermann. I've spoken to him once, maybe twice in my life."

“He’s Samwell Men’s Hockey alumni, isn’t he?” Dex points out. “And obviously, he knows more about these things than any of us. He could definitely help you get some perspective.”

“Maybe, but I can’t just… It’s not like I’ve even got his number.”

“Do you mind if I talk to him, then?” Dex suggests. “I’m sure he’d have your back, Whiskey. And if there’s ever a time when you should rely on all of your support systems, I think it’s probably now.”

“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Whiskey agrees, somewhat tersely. It goes without saying that talking to Jack equals getting Bitty in the loop, and Whiskey’s not sure if he’s completely ready for that, just yet. “You know, it’s really okay if… I mean, Jack Zimmermann is probably very busy.”

“Just leave it to me.” If Dex picks up on Whiskey’s discomfort on the subject, he doesn’t show it. “We should probably also consider how much I should tell the team, while you’re away? They’re bound to have some questions.”

Whiskey closes his eyes again, just briefly. Fuck. The team. Tango and Ford. Louis, Hops and Bully. Chowder and Nursey. Joyo and Jader. Pips. God fucking damnit.

“Tango and Ford already know,” Whiskey says, as evenly as he can manage. “As for the rest, could you just… Try to say as little as possible? At least for now.”

Dex takes a moment before he replies.

“They’re all going to be happy for you,” he says carefully. “You know that, right? Sad, too, and in some cases pretty fucking devastated. But happy, ultimately.”

“Maybe, yeah.” Whiskey attempts a casual shrug that he knows Dex will see right through. “I just think, if I’m really doing this, then I’m going to need to tell them all myself. So for now, just say that something came up and that I will be back on Saturday.”

“Alright,” Dex agrees. His tone is a lot gentler than before. “Sounds good.”

Whiskey nods, once.

They don’t talk much more for the rest of the drive.

Emily has booked Whiskey a first-class ticket, and that should be exciting or at least somewhat distracting, but it’s not. Whiskey barely takes in his surroundings as he moves through priority boarding and fully reclines in his very spacious seat. He manages to sleep a little on the plane, so at least that’s something.

A bored-looking driver collects Whiskey from the airport, and then they’re off straight towards the rink. Whiskey grits his teeth as he steps out of the car. This is it. This is actually fucking it.

Someone is waiting for him by the entrance. It’s one of the players Whiskey certainly knew by name even before he obsessively googled the Aeros’s current roster, the night before. Walt ‘Mickey’ Davis, team captain of the Aeros and one of the highest ranked defensemen in professional hockey.

Whiskey takes a breath. No big deal. Absolutely no big deal at all.

“I hear you’ve had a bit of a whirlwind, these past twelve hours,” Walt greets him. His handshake is firm, and Whiskey immediately likes the steady way he meets Whiskey’s eyes. If Walt Davis is at all concerned with the fact that two of his best forwards are out due to a broken collarbone and a torn meniscus, respectively, he certainly doesn’t show it. “It’s Connor Whisk, right? Let’s see what we can do with that. I go by Mickey.”

“I know,” Whiskey says, only to immediately feel stupid. Which, in itself, is stupid – the only reason he’s here is because he’s been explicitly asked to come, so if he somehow makes an utter fool of himself it’s actually kind of on them. Besides, all of this is just more hockey, isn’t it? Whiskey knows hockey. How fucking hard can it be? “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m really looking forward to getting on the ice with you guys.”

“Polite, eh?” Mickey smiles. “Come on. Let’s get you settled in as best as we can, before practice. I have to warn you, though – Ducky has this slight obsession with the Samwell NCAA team. He might have one or two questions. Just let me know if you ever need him to back off.”

Whiskey blinks. Right. What’s one more utterly baffling thing to navigate.

Ducky, it turns out, has a lot more than two questions. He instantly reminds Whiskey of Tango in the best way possible, which unfortunately makes Whiskey feel nauseous all over again – what the fuck is he even doing here – but he kind of also reminds Whiskey of Bitty in a way that calms him slightly, and of Chowder in a way that almost makes him smile.

“So obviously, there’s been a lot of talk,” Ducky says, after Whiskey has apparently satisfied his curiosity on Samwell’s defensive strategy during last season’s playoffs, “About Eric Bittle. You played with him, right?”

Whiskey stills.

“Uh, yeah. For two years.”

“That long, huh.” Ducky grins. “So, like, is there any chance you’ve got some intel on the whole jam situation?”

“Ducky,” Mickey says, somewhat warningly.

“No, I swear, it’s a whole thing!” Ducky insists. “I used to play with Poots on the Falconers, okay, and I’m telling you, Poots won’t fucking shut up about it!”

Slowly, Whiskey exhales.

“The jam is a whole thing,” he offers tentatively. “But, it’s not... I mean, Bitty’s jam is the greatest, yes, Poots is absolutely onto something there. It’s just, did he really not mention the pies?”

Ducky’s eyes widen.

“Oh my God. There’s pies, too?”

“Dude,” Whiskey says. He actually smiles. “The pies are where it’s really at.”

“Our nutritionist is gonna be all over this,” someone chirps – Lacer, if Whiskey’s not entirely mistaken. God, he’s gonna need fucking flashcards. "Are we talking, like, blueberry or apple, here? Or is there any chance for apricots?"

Somehow, inexplicably, the conversation about pie lasts all the way until they're lacing up their skates. It's only then that Whiskey realises they've talked a lot about Bitty, and at one point little about Jack, but not for one single second about Bitty and Jack. It just hasn't come up, even once. Whiskey's not entirely sure if that should make him feel relieved, or concerned.

Stepping onto the ice is like a breath of fresh air. Whiskey skates a lap, and then another, and it’s like he finally relaxes for the first time since last night. Pretty soon, Mickey calls them to order, and suddenly it’s all starting, but Whiskey still feels like he’s got a decent grip on himself. He’s got this. He can do this.

They run a bunch of drills focused on puck control, at first, and then split up into pairs to work on passing and receiving. And somehow, it all feels achingly familiar. It’s almost like Tango is right there next to Whiskey as he shoots the puck to Ducky over and over again – Whiskey gets the timing exactly right every time, but that's only because he and Tango spent all those hours fucking nailing their passes, last season. And later, when Whiskey races Mickey up the ice in a speed exercise that has him high on adrenaline, it’s almost like Pips skates furiously beside him, like always, pushing and pushing and pushing until Whiskey is giving it everything he’s got and then just a little bit more. It’s weirdly grounding, how every member of the Samwell team seems to manifest themselves through his playing, a constant reminder of how far they’ve all helped him come.

They play something of a mock-game towards the end of it, and Mickey has them changing up the lines again and again. By the time they’re wrapping things up, Whiskey thinks he’s played alongside each of the other forwards at least once.

They’re all good. They’re all really fucking good.

Mickey claps a hand on his back as they’re stepping back into the locker room.

“Not bad,” he says. “You’re fast.”

Not as fast as Pips, Whiskey doesn’t tell him. And neither are you.

“I try to be,” he says instead, and Mickey grins.

“You’ll catch up to an old man like me in no time,” he chirps kindly. “Now, I think Larsen wants to get hold of you sooner rather than later. Let’s try not keep her any longer, eh?”

Unsurprisingly, Emily Larsen is waiting for him when he steps out of the locker room.

“There you are,” she says brightly. “Welcome to Houston, Connor. We’re so happy to have you here at such short notice.”

He’s ushered off to something that turns out to be a meeting. There’s at least three different people who shake his hand on the way there – one of them is the nutritionist, who has somehow already heard rumours about baked goods. 

Emily promises not to keep him for too long, but she does have a few things that apparently can’t wait. She goes over the draft of his contract, aided by someone from the legal department who is able to answer some of Whiskey’s questions, which is good. Or well, it’s at least informative. Then there’s the question of housing options, which Whiskey decides to postpone until all of this is actually completely settled. He’s in a hotel, for now, which is perfectly fine. Finally, Emily runs through a brief power-point presentation on the Aeros, their history, and some aspects of life in Houston. Which isn’t uninteresting, exactly, but Whiskey is sort of more fucking exhausted than he remembers being in last year’s playoffs.

“Almost done,” Emily reassures him as she changes yet another slide.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the next headline captures Whiskey’s full attention. Outreach Activities – You Can Play & The Rainbow Puck Foundation. Our values and vision.

“Well,” Emily says. She looks at the screen, her expression almost a little confused. “This is, you know. What we stand for, and all of that.”

And just like that, she’s moved on to the next slide.

Right.

Whiskey checks into his hotel room, puts his suitcase down, makes it to the bed and sleeps for three hours.

When he wakes up, he’s got seven missed calls and more than twenty texts.

Most of the texts are from Miguel. Whiskey smiles softly while he scrolls through Miguel's more than familiar stream-of-consciousness. It's perhaps a little more chipper than usually, almost as if Miguel is making an effort to sound nothing but cheerful. Whiskey's heart aches desperately as he types up a few lines in response. got here okay. practice was fine. will call you tonight. I miss you so fucking much.

The calls are from Dex, Chowder, Louis and Pips. Pips has called twice, Dex thrice. Dex has also sent him five texts.

The last one contains Jack Zimmermann’s phone number.

call Jack, okay? he’d really like to hear from you. Bitty says hi, by the way.

Whiskey plugs in his phone, and gets up. If he’s going to have a heart to heart with one of the most high-profile players in the league, he’s going to take another shower, first, and his phone is going to have more than six percent battery.

About half an hour later, he’s put on pajamas, because fuck it, and settled into an armchair by the window with his hair still damp. His hands barely shake as he carefully types in the number.

Jack Zimmermann doesn’t pick up until the seventh ring.

“Connor?” he asks by way of greeting.

“Yeah.” Whiskey pulls his knees up to his chest and fiddles with the hem of his pajama pants. “Hi.”

“Give me just one second.” There’s a bustling noise, the sound of a door closing and then quiet. “There. It’s nice to talk to you again.”

“You, too.” God, Whiskey has no idea how the fuck he’s supposed to navigate this. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

“Not at all,” Jack reassures him. “How are you?”

“Um.” Whiskey grimaces. “Tired?”

“I can imagine,” Jack says, his voice surprisingly warm. “Dex filled me in a little bit, this morning. You’re already in Houston, right?”

“That’s right, yeah.”

“How are things, so far?”

“Not bad,” Whiskey decides, after a moment’s consideration. “I don’t really… I mean, I’ve actually barely had time to think about it.”

Jack hums.

“How long do you have, before you need to give them a definite answer?”

“Until Sunday.”

“Sunday. Okay.” Jack pauses momentarily. “That’s not unreasonable, on their part. Sometimes these things happen really fast.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Can I ask… Do you have an agent?”

“No, actually.” Whiskey runs a hand through his hair. “I haven’t really... I mean, I’ve basically been thinking that there would still be time before I’d need to consider these things more seriously. This opportunity was very unexpected.”

“Okay.” There’s another moment of silence before Jack speaks again. “Look, I’m just going to be very blunt about this. How much are these guys offering you?”

“Ah,” Whiskey says. He tries to remember – there’s been numbers mentioned, several of them, something about a signing bonus and a monthly salary and Whiskey’s barely registered anything beyond how that’s a lot of digits, holy cow. “I haven’t… Honestly, the financial aspect has sort of been the last thing on my mind.”

“Okay,” Jack says again, and there’s something of a smile in his voice. “I understand that, I really do. There are a lot of other important factors. It’s just, you should definitely think about getting an agent.”

“No, I know,” Whiskey agrees readily. “I, uh. This has all just happened really fast.”

“I’m getting that.” There’s no judgement in Jack’s tone. “But you haven’t actually signed anything yet, right? Not even some non-disclosure formality?"

“No, nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Then you’ve got the ball in your corner, still,” Jack says encouragingly. “Or, you know. The puck. This is all going to play out the way you decide is best, in the end.”

“... Right.” Suddenly, Whiskey wants to laugh. Fuck, he’s so tired. “The thing is, I’ve honestly got no clue how I’m supposed to figure that out. There’s no telling if I’ll ever get a better offer than this, and that’s...  A major concern for me. This is what I want to do, and I don’t know if I can afford to pass up on this chance. But I never imagined that I would need to be ready to take this step so soon, and I… I just don’t know if I’m going to be.” 

“Okay,” Jack says. And this time, he doesn’t need to pause and consider before he responds. “Look. The only thing you need to do, here, is make sure that you do right by yourself and what it is that you need. Okay? I know the Aeros are in a bit of a hurry, at the moment – I’ve heard all about those injuries and the estimated recovery times. They’re going to have several key players out for the rest of the season, and that’s certainly an urgent situation for them. Now, I’ve seen the way you play, Connor, and I’m more than familiar with your statistics. You’re good. Clearly, this is a move that makes complete sense for the Houston Aeros. The real question is, is it something that’s going to make complete sense for you?”

Whiskey closes his eyes for a moment. He exhales, and feels his shoulders relax a bit. Huh. When he opens his eyes again, looking out over the unfamiliar city outside his window, it’s like he finally has a moment of clarity.

“I don’t know,” he says, almost steadily. “I thought it might.”

“Well,” says Jack Zimmermann. He sounds almost fond, which is of course completely ridiculous. Clearly, Whiskey is having some sort of sleep-deprived hallucination. “Maybe don't rule it out after your very first day. But you might want to give that some serious thought, during the rest of this week.”

“Yeah.” Whiskey inhales, then exhales. “I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.”

Their conversation continues for a little while longer. Jack inquires about some of the Samwell team members, and coach Hall and Murray, and Whiskey finds himself surprisingly at ease as they take turns sharing a few personal anecdotes about Faber, and the Haus. It's never quite struck him, before, how much of a shared history he has with the generations of Samwell team members that came before him.

"I'd really like to stay in touch," Jack says before they hang up. Surprisingly, he tacks on something of a chirp. "If you're going to be my new competition, I'd like to know what I'm up against."

"I don't think I could give you competition," Whiskey tells him honestly, and if that reveals just a little more of Whiskey's deep and genuine admiration for Jack than he had maybe intended to show, well, so be it.

"Don't be so sure," Jack says plainly. "Take care out there, Connor. I'll talk to you soon."

ch. 20

[thrashermaxey]

Ramblings: Vegas Does It Again; Plekanec Makes History; Brent Burns Is Rolling – February 5

With the Super Bowl last night, we had a fairly light day for hockey with just three very early Sunday afternoon games. Here’s what went down.

*

Due to injuries and general under-performance across the roster, Montreal tried something a little different with their lineup on Sunday: a second line of Alex Galchenyuk, Jonathan Drouin, and Brendan Gallagher. A goal scorer, a play-maker, and a solid two-way winger on the same line. Maybe we could have something here!

And then:

Gallagher back with Plekanec and Scherbak back with Drouin. That thing lasted about six minutes.

— Аrpon Basu (@ArponBasu) February 4, 2018

What is even the point anymore.

There’s the potential that those three constitute Montreal’s top line next year and the team isn’t going to the postseason this year. Why not see what you have? But I digress.

Maybe it was all for the best, though, as Artturi Lehkonen scored a pair of goals in the second period, one of them assisted by Gallagher. Those were Lehkonen’s first goals since October. Seriously.

*

Tomas Plekanec also assisted on Lehkonen’s even-strength goal, giving him 600 points for his career (he later added a goal). He’ll never be considered among Montreal’s great players considering the storied history of the franchise, but if he stays healthy this year, and they don’t trade him, he’ll be one of six players to play 1000 games with the team. He’s also the 13th player in franchise history to get to 600 points in the Bleu, Blanc, et Rouge. No, he won’t be considered one of the greats, but he’s been an important part of the roster for much of this century.

*

Jeff Petry capped off a pretty good weekend as he scored in the 4-1 win for the Habs. That's three goals this weekend, and tying his career-high of eight. 

*

Ottawa looked mostly lifeless in this one, as they have so many games before, but Mike Hoffman is still Mike Hoffman, and shots like this is what should make him highly-coveted if (when) the Sens put him on the trade block:

If you're going to turn the puck over Mike Hoffman is going to make you pay. pic.twitter.com/xmjC9WwzdB

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) February 4, 2018

Carey Price never stood a chance.

*

It has been a completely miserable, utterly disastrous season for the Canadiens and comments from Marc Bergevin make it seem like the team will be trending towards youth. This coming less than a year after giving a 29-year old fringe NHL defenceman $23-million. Superb work all around.

One of the very few bright spots has been Brendan Gallagher. He has 18 goals, six off his career-high, and eight goals clear of last year’s mark. The assists totals are a problem, sure, having just nine (10 after Sunday). But he’s never been an assist guy, and Tomas Plekanec, Artturi Lehkonen, and Charles Hudon – three of his four most-common line mates – where shooting a combined 4.2 percent going into Sunday’s matinée. If his line mates can’t score, he can’t rack assists. If they could score, he’d be having a much better fantasy season.

The question now, is, what do we make of him next year?

It’s no secret that Montreal’s pipeline is mostly empty. Outside of Ryan Poehling, how many forward prospects look to even possess the potential of a future fantasy contributor? Not (m)any. So if Max Pacioretty is traded (that seems likely, whether at the deadline or in the summer), who’s left to put the puck in the next? Alex Galchenyuk, if he’s not traded himself. Jonathan Drouin? Maybe Lehkonen if he finds some consistency? It’s not pretty.

It’s a shame, too. Since the start of the 2013-14 season, Gallagher has the same goals/60 minutes rate at five-on-five (0.84) as Jaden Schwartz and Matt Duchene, and slightly higher than TJ Oshie (0.83). He’s been a first-line goal scorer for a while now, but injuries and lack of ice time have limited his upside in fantasy. I can’t imagine it gets better as this franchise continues its trajectory toward a full-fledged rebuild. He had a predictable bounce-back year, which is nice and should give us hope moving forward. But if the team is going to tear down around him, his bounce-back personally is mostly meaningless for fantasy.

*

Jeff Skinner has been mired in a little slump, heading into Sunday with one goal in eight games and just three goals since Christmas, a span of 17 contests. Has anything changed?

Since the holiday break, Skinner is second on his team in individual shot attempts per 60 minutes at 17.34. Not bad, right? It’s actually a huge drop-off from what he did at the start of the year; from game 1 through Christmas Eve, Skinner led the team in this regard at 22.78. Losing nearly one-quarter of your shot attempts will definitely supress offence, which is why his goals per 60 minutes have fallen off the map (0.74 since Christmas compared to 1.02 before) despite nearly identical shooting percentages (7.92 percent since Christmas compared to 7.69 before).

So, Skinner is shooting less. Why is he shooting less? Well, he was dropped of Justin Williams’ line, which has been a big reason. When they skated together earlier in the year (before Christmas), the ‘Canes generated 81.7 shot attempts per 60 minutes at five-on-five, and that is a colossal number. He didn’t spend the majority of his time there – about 36 percent of Skinner’s ice time was on Williams’ opposite wing – but when he did, they scored 2.84 goals per 60, a very good number. Since Christmas, Skinner has played roughly 20 percent of his ice time with the veteran on his right wing, and without him since Christmas, the team is generating just 60 shot attempts per 60 minutes at five-on-five, scoring 1.87 goals per 60.

That is a lot of numbers to throw at you in two paragraphs, so let’s summarize:

Without Williams and Skinner together, the Hurricanes are generating about 25 percent fewer shots since the holiday break with Skinner on the ice, and that has led to a drop in goals of about 34 percent. The result has been Skinner’s production decline.

Line combinations change all the time, and there’s no guarantee even if the two wingers are reunited that they’ll produce like they did earlier in the year. But there has been legitimate reason why Skinner hasn’t been scoring like he used to, and it’s not hand-waving at “unlucky.” He just needs line mates that can help him generate that offence. If you wanted to buy low on him, now would be the time in case there’s a shake-up with the forwards.  

*

By the way, there was a small shake-up with the forwards in Carolina’s Sunday afternoon game against San Jose, but for Skinner it only meant Lee Stempniak being replaced by Elias Lindholm. Maybe it helps; it didn’t in this one as Skinner managed just two shots and, of course, zero goals.

There will be more of this to come, however:

He said there will be changes to the lineup. Wasn’t happy with “this group.”

— Cory Lavalette (@corylav) February 4, 2018

*

Brent Burns led the way for the Sharks in their 3-1 win over Carolina, assisting on Timo Meier’s first-period tally and scoring himself in the second. After a somewhat slow start to the year, Burns now has 33 points in 29 games dating back to the start of December, averaging nearly 4.5 shots on goal per game in that span. It’s good to see the big man doing his thing again.

*

Speaking of Meier, that’s seven goals in 18 games since Christmas. On the season, after Sunday afternoon’s game, he’s up to 1.12 goals per 60 minutes at five-on-five this year. To put that into perspective, that’s the same rate as Mark Stone, just below Vladimir Tarasenko (1.16), and just above Patrick Kane (1.08).

Since being a top-10 pick in 2015, Sharks fans have been waiting for the kid to become one of their premier goal scorers. He’s not shooting a crazy-high percentage, either. He’s doing this through sheer shot generation. In other words, he’s scoring like a goal scorer, not like a luckbox. This is good news for San Jose’s faithful, and great news for Meier’s dynasty owners. All that’s missing now is top power-play minutes.

*

Sebastian Aho got the lone goal for Carolina in this one. Man, if Skinner isn’t scoring, Aho is really the only other threat here, huh.

*

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Vegas fell behind in a road game and then thanks to their first line, made a comeback to sneak away with a win. Just wild, right?

Chandler Stephenson made it 1-0, and then Ryan Carpenter tied it. Matt Niskanen made it 2-1, and then Reilly Smith tied it. Nicklas Backstrom made it 3-2, and then Smith tied it again. Alex Tuch scored the game-winner with about five minutes left in the third to seal the road victory at 4-3.

Smith had two goals, giving him 16 on the year. Four more for him and two more for Marchessault would give each member of the top line 20 tallies on the year. Pretty good.

*

My ever-evolving obsession with Jakub Vrana continues. He dressed again in this one but played the least of any Caps forward.

*

Matt Niskanen is quietly putting together another solid season playing behind John Carlson. His 82-game paces after his one-goal, one-assist performance Sunday works out to nine goals and 26 assists, more or less the player he’s been the majority of his career. Despite his earlier injury issues, Niskanen has been as expected. That speaks volumes to the quality of the player.

*

Speaking of brutal splits, TJ Oshie has one power-play goal in his last 24 games. One! In 24 games!

What has changed there?

If you want to split Oshie’s season in half, we’d have to go back to November 22nd. Up to that point, Oshie was taking 17 shots per 60 minutes at five-on-five; since that point, that has fallen to 14.22. That of course doesn’t explain his goals drop, it’s the fact that between those two points, his shooting percentage fell from over 46 percent (!) to an even 10 percent.

Oshie is shooting a little less with the man advantage, but it’s obviously the conversion rate that is truly sinking him, unlike Jeff Skinner at five-on-five. Owners can not do much but wait it out.

It should be noted that he’s scoring basically at the same rate he always had in St. Louis, but is shooting a lot less at five-on-five. He was never a volume shooter, but he’s shooting less than Riley Sheahan and Troy Brouwer this year. If that power-play percentage doesn’t start climbing, and that shot rate at five-on-five doesn’t improve, it’s hard to see how he breaks out of this funk to become a consistent scorer.

*

I do wonder what the Golden Knights do with David Perron. He’s never produced at this rate in his career (at least assists-wise) so he’s probably carrying more value than he would have even four months ago. But how can they justify someone producing so well for a team that, apparently, is a Cup contender? Interesting times ahead.

I suppose the same could apply for James Neal. But there’s no way they trade them, right? 

*

Filip Forsberg earned himself a three-game suspension for his interference hit on Jmmy Vesey on Saturday night: 

Nashville’s Filip Forsberg suspended three games for interference on NY Rangers’ Jimmy Vesey. https://t.co/7gTton1szC

— NHL Player Safety (@NHLPlayerSafety) February 4, 2018

This is pretty bad news for fantasy owners as it'd only been a couple games since returning from injury. Added to that is that their next three games were against the Leafs, Islanders, and Senators. Those are juicy offensive matchups. 

When Forsberg was out, Pontus Aberg got some minutes on the top line, though we'll probably have to wait until game-day skate to see who actually takes his spot this week. 

from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-vegas-does-it-again-plekanec-makes-history-brent-burns-is-rolling-february-5/

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/09/washington-post-when-a-uae-woman-skates-with-the-capitals-a-dream-is-coming-true-7/

Washington Post: When a UAE woman skates with the Capitals, ‘a dream is coming true’

Fatima Al Ali bumps gloves with Alex Ovechkin. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

Washington’s latest experiment with hockey diplomacy started with a 27-year old woman, wearing a Capitals jersey and a hijab, trying to make her heart stop pounding and her legs stop shaking.

Fatima Al Ali, a soft-spoken hockey fanatic from the United Arab Emirates, had flown across the world at the invitation of her favorite team. She had lunched with the team’s executives at the UAE embassy, visited with the team’s owner at her first NHL game, met the team’s stars in their Verizon Center dressing room, and broken into tears at the intensity of it all. Now she sat on the bench at the team’s practice rink Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of still photographers — the sort of crowd that usually emerges only during the playoffs. Her younger brother sat next to her, and Al Ali kept leaning over, asking him to remind her to breathe.

Practice broke, she was beckoned onto the ice, and players tapped their sticks to welcome the newcomer. Then, between whistling shots at the net and fiddling with an unfamiliar stick, she figured out how to calm down.

“Just talking about hockey — something we all share, and something we all love,” she said.

[Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sport. A new generation now chases Olympic glory.]

So she chatted with Russian Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player, about trying to find ice time in Abu Dhabi. (“She was amazing,” Ovechkin said.) She talked about blade curvature with American T.J. Oshie, whose stick she borrowed. (“To see the smile on her face out there, obviously she was doing what she loves,” Oshie said.) She received a playful mid-ice nudge from Canadian Justin Williams, and worked on scooping the puck off the ground with Canadian Tom Wilson. And when she later took a pass from Ovechkin and sent a one-timer into the net, the international roster whooped, Evgeny Kuznetsov pumping his arm in celebration.

CBS Evening News and PBS and CNN and Reuters were at this Capitals practice because of the young woman in the hijab, a striking image at this particular moment. On the ice, though, they weren’t talking about international relations.

“For me, it’s just a hockey player seeing another hockey player go out there and have some fun,” Oshie said. “I don’t really need to or want to get into the political stuff. My first impression was just that it’s cool that someone from so far away can still share the love of the game.”

Hockey ‘makes me alive’

This started thousands of miles away with “The Mighty Ducks” — the movie, not the team. Al Ali speaks flawless English, which she attributed to a movie obsession, and as a kid, she fixated on hockey movies: “Slap Shot,” “Miracle,” and the goofy 1992 Emilio Estevez vehicle about an unlikely team of skaters.

“Hockey was something different, more interesting than soccer,” she said.

She’d been skating since she was 7, but the game remained mostly Hollywood in her mind.

Then, in 2008, she saw a brochure at the mall, advertising an upcoming men’s tournament. She showed up at the tournament with her camera, and organizers asked her to take photos of their team. That team became a club known as the Abu Dhabi Storms, and Al Ali became its photographer. In 2010 the club established a fledgling women’s team — featuring both teenagers and women in their 30s — and the players repeatedly asked their photographer to join them on the ice.

“You guys can’t even skate; why would I want to join the team?” she asked them, but the requests wouldn’t stop. Finally she told them to get her equipment, and she started practicing with grade-schoolers half her size, who looked at her in puzzlement. She’d been playing competitive sports since she was 3; soccer and basketball, diving and golf. (“I have this code in my head: If I start something, I have to be good at it,” she said.) Hockey felt different.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she said. “It almost just makes me alive, makes me have energy, excited. I don’t know — I feel like I’m home. That’s my place. This is where I should be. So from that time, I cannot stay away from the rink.”

[Marriage, motherhood, education, maybe sports: Female Muslim athletes’ expected priorities]

Abu Dhabi, she said, has one hockey rink, with one sheet of ice, which is usually occupied by men’s teams. The closest women’s competition is in Dubai, about an hour away, and is not particularly elite. (“A bunch of old ladies,” Al Ali quipped.) Still, she did everything she could to stay around the game. She coached children. She skated with men, who worried about injuring her. She worked with equipment managers. She began officiating, both international girls’ tournaments and the local league, made up mostly of expats. She tried to break up an on-ice fight and got punched in the head, which led some of the men’s players to suggest maybe this wasn’t the place for a toothpick-thin young woman.

“I’m not getting out,” she told them. “This is hockey.” 

She also became an NHL devotee, streaming games as soon as she arrived at work in the morning, which meant she needed a team. She knew of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the NHL’s two most famous stars — and watched YouTube videos of both men to help her choose. “Both are great players, but one was a scorer,” she said. “I wanted to be a scorer.” Ovechkin’s Capitals became her favorite team.

She watched more videos, too, of stickhandling tricks performed by Crosby and Pavel Datsyuk and random YouTubers. “Okay, I should try this,” she thought. Years of practice later, there she was at her home rink, wearing a hijab and sandals, spinning around a puck that seemed glued to her stick. Retired Caps star Peter Bondra happened to be in the rink that day, working a hockey clinic in conjunction with his former team, and someone told him to look at Al Ali. 

“I stopped whatever we had been doing,” Bondra recalled. “The way she handled the puck, it was amazing. … I said, ‘Hold on, this is something. I have to start talking with the lady.’ ”

He approached and asked if he could take a video of her tricks, something to post on his Twitter account. She said sure. “It’s safe to say she has better hands than me!” Bondra wrote. As the video went viral and U.S. hockey reporters took notice, the two struck up a friendship, a 40-something Slovak star and a 20-something Emirati woman.

This is Fatima. She represents the UAE on their women’s national team & it’s safe to say she has better hands than me! @Capitals @MSE @NHL pic.twitter.com/m4N2IddeRl

— Peter Bondra (@PeterBondra12) November 13, 2016

“She just was a natural,” Bondra said. “You feel like you’re talking to a hockey guy, a hockey player. We can relate easy in that conversation, in that hockey talk.”

When Bondra learned that her favorite team was the Capitals and that she had never been to an NHL game, he promised to take her to Verizon Center if she ever visited D.C. A few days later, she texted to ask if the offer stood. “Of course, that always will stand,” he told her. By that time, the team was working to bring her to Washington.

‘I’m freaking out’

Fatima Al Ali with UAE ambassador to the U.S.  Yousef Al Otaiba. (By Haitham Al Mussawi / Embassy of the United Arab Emirates)

Al Ali and her younger brother Mohammed arrived in Washington this week. They went to Monday’s Wizards-Cavaliers game. They had lunch at the UAE embassy Tuesday, where Al Ali presented Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba with a signed jersey from her team, filled with neat autographs and smiley faces. The siblings listened to the ambassador — a Georgetown graduate who is close with several Caps executives — talk about how much he loves her story, how he wants to bring Al Ali’s team to the States for an exhibition tour.

“I don’t think we’re good enough,” she told him.

“It’s not about being good enough,” he said, “it’s about …”

“The experience,” she agreed.

“I’m really serious,” he said, instructing an aide to start working up a plan. “It would be good for some of our diplomacy efforts … especially at a moment like this politically.”

Indeed, Al Ali’s visit came as the country debates President Trump’s immigration order temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. (The UAE, a U.S. ally, was not one of the seven countries.) Al Ali didn’t want to talk about politics, but her brother said he was nervous coming to Washington in this climate, and also hopeful that their visit could be significant. (“I believe it might give people a different look at how it is in the Middle East or the UAE,” he said. “We’re the same as you guys.”)  

[Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered]

And yet as Al Ali clutched her hands together inside the embassy and thought about sharing the ice with her favorite players, she seemed less like a diplomat than a star-struck fan from Rockville or Reston.

“I’m freaking out,” she confessed. “I’ve been trying to come to D.C. since I started hockey … and then suddenly this thing happens. Unbelievable. A dream is coming true.”

Tuesday night she met Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom in the team’s dressing room. Wednesday morning, team officials presented her with a personalized jersey and told her to grab a player’s stick and take it onto the ice. She passed the puck back and forth with Ovechkin, struggled to recreate her tricks with Oshie’s curved stick, and filled in for an assistant coach, feeding pucks for the Caps to pummel. Then she talked to the type of media scrum a bottom-pair defenseman might never encounter in his career.

Fatima shoots and scores at #Caps practice! pic.twitter.com/ztKqCAkJCU

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 8, 2017

She told them how she picked up the game, how she fell for Ovechkin and how she met Bondra. She told them about the challenges of playing hockey in the Middle East, and about what lessons she hopes to bring back to the kids she coaches. She talked about breaking barriers and inspiring strangers, and how this was “the best thing that happened in my life.”

Then she headed off for more interviews and a trip to the Maryland suburbs to practice with a local women’s team, while Coach Barry Trotz answered questions about his third-line winger and his team’s defense and upcoming schedule — and about their visitor from across the world.

“This generation of players now, I think, understand that there is diversity in the world and our game is for everybody,” Trotz said. “Just seeing her smile and the guys having fun and doing all that — I think that’s a good message for society right now.”

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/09/washington-post-when-a-uae-woman-skates-with-the-capitals-a-dream-is-coming-true-5/

Washington Post: When a UAE woman skates with the Capitals, ‘a dream is coming true’

Fatima Al Ali bumps gloves with Alex Ovechkin. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

Washington’s latest experiment with hockey diplomacy started with a 27-year old woman, wearing a Capitals jersey and a hijab, trying to make her heart stop pounding and her legs stop shaking.

Fatima Al Ali, a soft-spoken hockey fanatic from the United Arab Emirates, had flown across the world at the invitation of her favorite team. She had lunched with the team’s executives at the UAE embassy, visited with the team’s owner at her first NHL game, met the team’s stars in their Verizon Center dressing room, and broken into tears at the intensity of it all. Now she sat on the bench at the team’s practice rink Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of still photographers — the sort of crowd that usually emerges only during the playoffs. Her younger brother sat next to her, and Al Ali kept leaning over, asking him to remind her to breathe.

Practice broke, she was beckoned onto the ice, and players tapped their sticks to welcome the newcomer. Then, between whistling shots at the net and fiddling with an unfamiliar stick, she figured out how to calm down.

“Just talking about hockey — something we all share, and something we all love,” she said.

[Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sport. A new generation now chases Olympic glory.]

So she chatted with Russian Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player, about trying to find ice time in Abu Dhabi. (“She was amazing,” Ovechkin said.) She talked about blade curvature with American T.J. Oshie, whose stick she borrowed. (“To see the smile on her face out there, obviously she was doing what she loves,” Oshie said.) She received a playful mid-ice nudge from Canadian Justin Williams, and worked on scooping the puck off the ground with Canadian Tom Wilson. And when she later took a pass from Ovechkin and sent a one-timer into the net, the international roster whooped, Evgeny Kuznetsov pumping his arm in celebration.

CBS Evening News and PBS and CNN and Reuters were at this Capitals practice because of the young woman in the hijab, a striking image at this particular moment. On the ice, though, they weren’t talking about international relations.

“For me, it’s just a hockey player seeing another hockey player go out there and have some fun,” Oshie said. “I don’t really need to or want to get into the political stuff. My first impression was just that it’s cool that someone from so far away can still share the love of the game.”

Hockey ‘makes me alive’

This started thousands of miles away with “The Mighty Ducks” — the movie, not the team. Al Ali speaks flawless English, which she attributed to a movie obsession, and as a kid, she fixated on hockey movies: “Slap Shot,” “Miracle,” and the goofy 1992 Emilio Estevez vehicle about an unlikely team of skaters.

“Hockey was something different, more interesting than soccer,” she said.

She’d been skating since she was 7, but the game remained mostly Hollywood in her mind.

Then, in 2008, she saw a brochure at the mall, advertising an upcoming men’s tournament. She showed up at the tournament with her camera, and organizers asked her to take photos of their team. That team became a club known as the Abu Dhabi Storms, and Al Ali became its photographer. In 2010 the club established a fledgling women’s team — featuring both teenagers and women in their 30s — and the players repeatedly asked their photographer to join them on the ice.

“You guys can’t even skate; why would I want to join the team?” she asked them, but the requests wouldn’t stop. Finally she told them to get her equipment, and she started practicing with grade-schoolers half her size, who looked at her in puzzlement. She’d been playing competitive sports since she was 3; soccer and basketball, diving and golf. (“I have this code in my head: If I start something, I have to be good at it,” she said.) Hockey felt different.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she said. “It almost just makes me alive, makes me have energy, excited. I don’t know — I feel like I’m home. That’s my place. This is where I should be. So from that time, I cannot stay away from the rink.”

[Marriage, motherhood, education, maybe sports: Female Muslim athletes’ expected priorities]

Abu Dhabi, she said, has one hockey rink, with one sheet of ice, which is usually occupied by men’s teams. The closest women’s competition is in Dubai, about an hour away, and is not particularly elite. (“A bunch of old ladies,” Al Ali quipped.) Still, she did everything she could to stay around the game. She coached children. She skated with men, who worried about injuring her. She worked with equipment managers. She began officiating, both international girls’ tournaments and the local league, made up mostly of expats. She tried to break up an on-ice fight and got punched in the head, which led some of the men’s players to suggest maybe this wasn’t the place for a toothpick-thin young woman.

“I’m not getting out,” she told them. “This is hockey.” 

She also became an NHL devotee, streaming games as soon as she arrived at work in the morning, which meant she needed a team. She knew of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the NHL’s two most famous stars — and watched YouTube videos of both men to help her choose. “Both are great players, but one was a scorer,” she said. “I wanted to be a scorer.” Ovechkin’s Capitals became her favorite team.

She watched more videos, too, of stickhandling tricks performed by Crosby and Pavel Datsyuk and random YouTubers. “Okay, I should try this,” she thought. Years of practice later, there she was at her home rink, wearing a hijab and sandals, spinning around a puck that seemed glued to her stick. Retired Caps star Peter Bondra happened to be in the rink that day, working a hockey clinic in conjunction with his former team, and someone told him to look at Al Ali. 

“I stopped whatever we had been doing,” Bondra recalled. “The way she handled the puck, it was amazing. … I said, ‘Hold on, this is something. I have to start talking with the lady.’ ”

He approached and asked if he could take a video of her tricks, something to post on his Twitter account. She said sure. “It’s safe to say she has better hands than me!” Bondra wrote. As the video went viral and U.S. hockey reporters took notice, the two struck up a friendship, a 40-something Slovak star and a 20-something Emirati woman.

This is Fatima. She represents the UAE on their women’s national team & it’s safe to say she has better hands than me! @Capitals @MSE @NHL pic.twitter.com/m4N2IddeRl

— Peter Bondra (@PeterBondra12) November 13, 2016

“She just was a natural,” Bondra said. “You feel like you’re talking to a hockey guy, a hockey player. We can relate easy in that conversation, in that hockey talk.”

When Bondra learned that her favorite team was the Capitals and that she had never been to an NHL game, he promised to take her to Verizon Center if she ever visited D.C. A few days later, she texted to ask if the offer stood. “Of course, that always will stand,” he told her. By that time, the team was working to bring her to Washington.

‘I’m freaking out’

Fatima Al Ali with UAE ambassador to the U.S.  Yousef Al Otaiba. (By Haitham Al Mussawi / Embassy of the United Arab Emirates)

Al Ali and her younger brother Mohammed arrived in Washington this week. They went to Monday’s Wizards-Cavaliers game. They had lunch at the UAE embassy Tuesday, where Al Ali presented Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba with a signed jersey from her team, filled with neat autographs and smiley faces. The siblings listened to the ambassador — a Georgetown graduate who is close with several Caps executives — talk about how much he loves her story, how he wants to bring Al Ali’s team to the States for an exhibition tour.

“I don’t think we’re good enough,” she told him.

“It’s not about being good enough,” he said, “it’s about …”

“The experience,” she agreed.

“I’m really serious,” he said, instructing an aide to start working up a plan. “It would be good for some of our diplomacy efforts … especially at a moment like this politically.”

Indeed, Al Ali’s visit came as the country debates President Trump’s immigration order temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. (The UAE, a U.S. ally, was not one of the seven countries.) Al Ali didn’t want to talk about politics, but her brother said he was nervous coming to Washington in this climate, and also hopeful that their visit could be significant. (“I believe it might give people a different look at how it is in the Middle East or the UAE,” he said. “We’re the same as you guys.”)  

[Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered]

And yet as Al Ali clutched her hands together inside the embassy and thought about sharing the ice with her favorite players, she seemed less like a diplomat than a star-struck fan from Rockville or Reston.

“I’m freaking out,” she confessed. “I’ve been trying to come to D.C. since I started hockey … and then suddenly this thing happens. Unbelievable. A dream is coming true.”

Tuesday night she met Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom in the team’s dressing room. Wednesday morning, team officials presented her with a personalized jersey and told her to grab a player’s stick and take it onto the ice. She passed the puck back and forth with Ovechkin, struggled to recreate her tricks with Oshie’s curved stick, and filled in for an assistant coach, feeding pucks for the Caps to pummel. Then she talked to the type of media scrum a bottom-pair defenseman might never encounter in his career.

Fatima shoots and scores at #Caps practice! pic.twitter.com/ztKqCAkJCU

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 8, 2017

She told them how she picked up the game, how she fell for Ovechkin and how she met Bondra. She told them about the challenges of playing hockey in the Middle East, and about what lessons she hopes to bring back to the kids she coaches. She talked about breaking barriers and inspiring strangers, and how this was “the best thing that happened in my life.”

Then she headed off for more interviews and a trip to the Maryland suburbs to practice with a local women’s team, while Coach Barry Trotz answered questions about his third-line winger and his team’s defense and upcoming schedule — and about their visitor from across the world.

“This generation of players now, I think, understand that there is diversity in the world and our game is for everybody,” Trotz said. “Just seeing her smile and the guys having fun and doing all that — I think that’s a good message for society right now.”

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Washington Post: When a UAE woman skates with the Capitals, ‘a dream is coming true’

Fatima Al Ali bumps gloves with Alex Ovechkin. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

Washington’s latest experiment with hockey diplomacy started with a 27-year old woman, wearing a Capitals jersey and a hijab, trying to make her heart stop pounding and her legs stop shaking.

Fatima Al Ali, a soft-spoken hockey fanatic from the United Arab Emirates, had flown across the world at the invitation of her favorite team. She had lunched with the team’s executives at the UAE embassy, visited with the team’s owner at her first NHL game, met the team’s stars in their Verizon Center dressing room, and broken into tears at the intensity of it all. Now she sat on the bench at the team’s practice rink Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of still photographers — the sort of crowd that usually emerges only during the playoffs. Her younger brother sat next to her, and Al Ali kept leaning over, asking him to remind her to breathe.

Practice broke, she was beckoned onto the ice, and players tapped their sticks to welcome the newcomer. Then, between whistling shots at the net and fiddling with an unfamiliar stick, she figured out how to calm down.

“Just talking about hockey — something we all share, and something we all love,” she said.

[Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sport. A new generation now chases Olympic glory.]

So she chatted with Russian Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player, about trying to find ice time in Abu Dhabi. (“She was amazing,” Ovechkin said.) She talked about blade curvature with American T.J. Oshie, whose stick she borrowed. (“To see the smile on her face out there, obviously she was doing what she loves,” Oshie said.) She received a playful mid-ice nudge from Canadian Justin Williams, and worked on scooping the puck off the ground with Canadian Tom Wilson. And when she later took a pass from Ovechkin and sent a one-timer into the net, the international roster whooped, Evgeny Kuznetsov pumping his arm in celebration.

CBS Evening News and PBS and CNN and Reuters were at this Capitals practice because of the young woman in the hijab, a striking image at this particular moment. On the ice, though, they weren’t talking about international relations.

“For me, it’s just a hockey player seeing another hockey player go out there and have some fun,” Oshie said. “I don’t really need to or want to get into the political stuff. My first impression was just that it’s cool that someone from so far away can still share the love of the game.”

Hockey ‘makes me alive’

This started thousands of miles away with “The Mighty Ducks” — the movie, not the team. Al Ali speaks flawless English, which she attributed to a movie obsession, and as a kid, she fixated on hockey movies: “Slap Shot,” “Miracle,” and the goofy 1992 Emilio Estevez vehicle about an unlikely team of skaters.

“Hockey was something different, more interesting than soccer,” she said.

She’d been skating since she was 7, but the game remained mostly Hollywood in her mind.

Then, in 2008, she saw a brochure at the mall, advertising an upcoming men’s tournament. She showed up at the tournament with her camera, and organizers asked her to take photos of their team. That team became a club known as the Abu Dhabi Storms, and Al Ali became its photographer. In 2010 the club established a fledgling women’s team — featuring both teenagers and women in their 30s — and the players repeatedly asked their photographer to join them on the ice.

“You guys can’t even skate; why would I want to join the team?” she asked them, but the requests wouldn’t stop. Finally she told them to get her equipment, and she started practicing with grade-schoolers half her size, who looked at her in puzzlement. She’d been playing competitive sports since she was 3; soccer and basketball, diving and golf. (“I have this code in my head: If I start something, I have to be good at it,” she said.) Hockey felt different.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she said. “It almost just makes me alive, makes me have energy, excited. I don’t know — I feel like I’m home. That’s my place. This is where I should be. So from that time, I cannot stay away from the rink.”

[Marriage, motherhood, education, maybe sports: Female Muslim athletes’ expected priorities]

Abu Dhabi, she said, has one hockey rink, with one sheet of ice, which is usually occupied by men’s teams. The closest women’s competition is in Dubai, about an hour away, and is not particularly elite. (“A bunch of old ladies,” Al Ali quipped.) Still, she did everything she could to stay around the game. She coached children. She skated with men, who worried about injuring her. She worked with equipment managers. She began officiating, both international girls’ tournaments and the local league, made up mostly of expats. She tried to break up an on-ice fight and got punched in the head, which led some of the men’s players to suggest maybe this wasn’t the place for a toothpick-thin young woman.

“I’m not getting out,” she told them. “This is hockey.” 

She also became an NHL devotee, streaming games as soon as she arrived at work in the morning, which meant she needed a team. She knew of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the NHL’s two most famous stars — and watched YouTube videos of both men to help her choose. “Both are great players, but one was a scorer,” she said. “I wanted to be a scorer.” Ovechkin’s Capitals became her favorite team.

She watched more videos, too, of stickhandling tricks performed by Crosby and Pavel Datsyuk and random YouTubers. “Okay, I should try this,” she thought. Years of practice later, there she was at her home rink, wearing a hijab and sandals, spinning around a puck that seemed glued to her stick. Retired Caps star Peter Bondra happened to be in the rink that day, working a hockey clinic in conjunction with his former team, and someone told him to look at Al Ali. 

“I stopped whatever we had been doing,” Bondra recalled. “The way she handled the puck, it was amazing. … I said, ‘Hold on, this is something. I have to start talking with the lady.’ ”

He approached and asked if he could take a video of her tricks, something to post on his Twitter account. She said sure. “It’s safe to say she has better hands than me!” Bondra wrote. As the video went viral and U.S. hockey reporters took notice, the two struck up a friendship, a 40-something Slovak star and a 20-something Emirati woman.

This is Fatima. She represents the UAE on their women’s national team & it’s safe to say she has better hands than me! @Capitals @MSE @NHL pic.twitter.com/m4N2IddeRl

— Peter Bondra (@PeterBondra12) November 13, 2016

“She just was a natural,” Bondra said. “You feel like you’re talking to a hockey guy, a hockey player. We can relate easy in that conversation, in that hockey talk.”

When Bondra learned that her favorite team was the Capitals and that she had never been to an NHL game, he promised to take her to Verizon Center if she ever visited D.C. A few days later, she texted to ask if the offer stood. “Of course, that always will stand,” he told her. By that time, the team was working to bring her to Washington.

‘I’m freaking out’

Fatima Al Ali with UAE ambassador to the U.S.  Yousef Al Otaiba. (By Haitham Al Mussawi / Embassy of the United Arab Emirates)

Al Ali and her younger brother Mohammed arrived in Washington this week. They went to Monday’s Wizards-Cavaliers game. They had lunch at the UAE embassy Tuesday, where Al Ali presented Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba with a signed jersey from her team, filled with neat autographs and smiley faces. The siblings listened to the ambassador — a Georgetown graduate who is close with several Caps executives — talk about how much he loves her story, how he wants to bring Al Ali’s team to the States for an exhibition tour.

“I don’t think we’re good enough,” she told him.

“It’s not about being good enough,” he said, “it’s about …”

“The experience,” she agreed.

“I’m really serious,” he said, instructing an aide to start working up a plan. “It would be good for some of our diplomacy efforts … especially at a moment like this politically.”

Indeed, Al Ali’s visit came as the country debates President Trump’s immigration order temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. (The UAE, a U.S. ally, was not one of the seven countries.) Al Ali didn’t want to talk about politics, but her brother said he was nervous coming to Washington in this climate, and also hopeful that their visit could be significant. (“I believe it might give people a different look at how it is in the Middle East or the UAE,” he said. “We’re the same as you guys.”)  

[Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered]

And yet as Al Ali clutched her hands together inside the embassy and thought about sharing the ice with her favorite players, she seemed less like a diplomat than a star-struck fan from Rockville or Reston.

“I’m freaking out,” she confessed. “I’ve been trying to come to D.C. since I started hockey … and then suddenly this thing happens. Unbelievable. A dream is coming true.”

Tuesday night she met Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom in the team’s dressing room. Wednesday morning, team officials presented her with a personalized jersey and told her to grab a player’s stick and take it onto the ice. She passed the puck back and forth with Ovechkin, struggled to recreate her tricks with Oshie’s curved stick, and filled in for an assistant coach, feeding pucks for the Caps to pummel. Then she talked to the type of media scrum a bottom-pair defenseman might never encounter in his career.

Fatima shoots and scores at #Caps practice! pic.twitter.com/ztKqCAkJCU

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 8, 2017

She told them how she picked up the game, how she fell for Ovechkin and how she met Bondra. She told them about the challenges of playing hockey in the Middle East, and about what lessons she hopes to bring back to the kids she coaches. She talked about breaking barriers and inspiring strangers, and how this was “the best thing that happened in my life.”

Then she headed off for more interviews and a trip to the Maryland suburbs to practice with a local women’s team, while Coach Barry Trotz answered questions about his third-line winger and his team’s defense and upcoming schedule — and about their visitor from across the world.

“This generation of players now, I think, understand that there is diversity in the world and our game is for everybody,” Trotz said. “Just seeing her smile and the guys having fun and doing all that — I think that’s a good message for society right now.”

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/09/washington-post-when-a-uae-woman-skates-with-the-capitals-a-dream-is-coming-true-3/

Washington Post: When a UAE woman skates with the Capitals, ‘a dream is coming true’

Fatima Al Ali bumps gloves with Alex Ovechkin. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

Washington’s latest experiment with hockey diplomacy started with a 27-year old woman, wearing a Capitals jersey and a hijab, trying to make her heart stop pounding and her legs stop shaking.

Fatima Al Ali, a soft-spoken hockey fanatic from the United Arab Emirates, had flown across the world at the invitation of her favorite team. She had lunched with the team’s executives at the UAE embassy, visited with the team’s owner at her first NHL game, met the team’s stars in their Verizon Center dressing room, and broken into tears at the intensity of it all. Now she sat on the bench at the team’s practice rink Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of still photographers — the sort of crowd that usually emerges only during the playoffs. Her younger brother sat next to her, and Al Ali kept leaning over, asking him to remind her to breathe.

Practice broke, she was beckoned onto the ice, and players tapped their sticks to welcome the newcomer. Then, between whistling shots at the net and fiddling with an unfamiliar stick, she figured out how to calm down.

“Just talking about hockey — something we all share, and something we all love,” she said.

[Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sport. A new generation now chases Olympic glory.]

So she chatted with Russian Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player, about trying to find ice time in Abu Dhabi. (“She was amazing,” Ovechkin said.) She talked about blade curvature with American T.J. Oshie, whose stick she borrowed. (“To see the smile on her face out there, obviously she was doing what she loves,” Oshie said.) She received a playful mid-ice nudge from Canadian Justin Williams, and worked on scooping the puck off the ground with Canadian Tom Wilson. And when she later took a pass from Ovechkin and sent a one-timer into the net, the international roster whooped, Evgeny Kuznetsov pumping his arm in celebration.

CBS Evening News and PBS and CNN and Reuters were at this Capitals practice because of the young woman in the hijab, a striking image at this particular moment. On the ice, though, they weren’t talking about international relations.

“For me, it’s just a hockey player seeing another hockey player go out there and have some fun,” Oshie said. “I don’t really need to or want to get into the political stuff. My first impression was just that it’s cool that someone from so far away can still share the love of the game.”

Hockey ‘makes me alive’

This started thousands of miles away with “The Mighty Ducks” — the movie, not the team. Al Ali speaks flawless English, which she attributed to a movie obsession, and as a kid, she fixated on hockey movies: “Slap Shot,” “Miracle,” and the goofy 1992 Emilio Estevez vehicle about an unlikely team of skaters.

“Hockey was something different, more interesting than soccer,” she said.

She’d been skating since she was 7, but the game remained mostly Hollywood in her mind.

Then, in 2008, she saw a brochure at the mall, advertising an upcoming men’s tournament. She showed up at the tournament with her camera, and organizers asked her to take photos of their team. That team became a club known as the Abu Dhabi Storms, and Al Ali became its photographer. In 2010 the club established a fledgling women’s team — featuring both teenagers and women in their 30s — and the players repeatedly asked their photographer to join them on the ice.

“You guys can’t even skate; why would I want to join the team?” she asked them, but the requests wouldn’t stop. Finally she told them to get her equipment, and she started practicing with grade-schoolers half her size, who looked at her in puzzlement. She’d been playing competitive sports since she was 3; soccer and basketball, diving and golf. (“I have this code in my head: If I start something, I have to be good at it,” she said.) Hockey felt different.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she said. “It almost just makes me alive, makes me have energy, excited. I don’t know — I feel like I’m home. That’s my place. This is where I should be. So from that time, I cannot stay away from the rink.”

[Marriage, motherhood, education, maybe sports: Female Muslim athletes’ expected priorities]

Abu Dhabi, she said, has one hockey rink, with one sheet of ice, which is usually occupied by men’s teams. The closest women’s competition is in Dubai, about an hour away, and is not particularly elite. (“A bunch of old ladies,” Al Ali quipped.) Still, she did everything she could to stay around the game. She coached children. She skated with men, who worried about injuring her. She worked with equipment managers. She began officiating, both international girls’ tournaments and the local league, made up mostly of expats. She tried to break up an on-ice fight and got punched in the head, which led some of the men’s players to suggest maybe this wasn’t the place for a toothpick-thin young woman.

“I’m not getting out,” she told them. “This is hockey.” 

She also became an NHL devotee, streaming games as soon as she arrived at work in the morning, which meant she needed a team. She knew of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the NHL’s two most famous stars — and watched YouTube videos of both men to help her choose. “Both are great players, but one was a scorer,” she said. “I wanted to be a scorer.” Ovechkin’s Capitals became her favorite team.

She watched more videos, too, of stickhandling tricks performed by Crosby and Pavel Datsyuk and random YouTubers. “Okay, I should try this,” she thought. Years of practice later, there she was at her home rink, wearing a hijab and sandals, spinning around a puck that seemed glued to her stick. Retired Caps star Peter Bondra happened to be in the rink that day, working a hockey clinic in conjunction with his former team, and someone told him to look at Al Ali. 

“I stopped whatever we had been doing,” Bondra recalled. “The way she handled the puck, it was amazing. … I said, ‘Hold on, this is something. I have to start talking with the lady.’ ”

He approached and asked if he could take a video of her tricks, something to post on his Twitter account. She said sure. “It’s safe to say she has better hands than me!” Bondra wrote. As the video went viral and U.S. hockey reporters took notice, the two struck up a friendship, a 40-something Slovak star and a 20-something Emirati woman.

This is Fatima. She represents the UAE on their women’s national team & it’s safe to say she has better hands than me! @Capitals @MSE @NHL pic.twitter.com/m4N2IddeRl

— Peter Bondra (@PeterBondra12) November 13, 2016

“She just was a natural,” Bondra said. “You feel like you’re talking to a hockey guy, a hockey player. We can relate easy in that conversation, in that hockey talk.”

When Bondra learned that her favorite team was the Capitals and that she had never been to an NHL game, he promised to take her to Verizon Center if she ever visited D.C. A few days later, she texted to ask if the offer stood. “Of course, that always will stand,” he told her. By that time, the team was working to bring her to Washington.

‘I’m freaking out’

Fatima Al Ali with UAE ambassador to the U.S.  Yousef Al Otaiba. (By Haitham Al Mussawi / Embassy of the United Arab Emirates)

Al Ali and her younger brother Mohammed arrived in Washington this week. They went to Monday’s Wizards-Cavaliers game. They had lunch at the UAE embassy Tuesday, where Al Ali presented Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba with a signed jersey from her team, filled with neat autographs and smiley faces. The siblings listened to the ambassador — a Georgetown graduate who is close with several Caps executives — talk about how much he loves her story, how he wants to bring Al Ali’s team to the States for an exhibition tour.

“I don’t think we’re good enough,” she told him.

“It’s not about being good enough,” he said, “it’s about …”

“The experience,” she agreed.

“I’m really serious,” he said, instructing an aide to start working up a plan. “It would be good for some of our diplomacy efforts … especially at a moment like this politically.”

Indeed, Al Ali’s visit came as the country debates President Trump’s immigration order temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. (The UAE, a U.S. ally, was not one of the seven countries.) Al Ali didn’t want to talk about politics, but her brother said he was nervous coming to Washington in this climate, and also hopeful that their visit could be significant. (“I believe it might give people a different look at how it is in the Middle East or the UAE,” he said. “We’re the same as you guys.”)  

[Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered]

And yet as Al Ali clutched her hands together inside the embassy and thought about sharing the ice with her favorite players, she seemed less like a diplomat than a star-struck fan from Rockville or Reston.

“I’m freaking out,” she confessed. “I’ve been trying to come to D.C. since I started hockey … and then suddenly this thing happens. Unbelievable. A dream is coming true.”

Tuesday night she met Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom in the team’s dressing room. Wednesday morning, team officials presented her with a personalized jersey and told her to grab a player’s stick and take it onto the ice. She passed the puck back and forth with Ovechkin, struggled to recreate her tricks with Oshie’s curved stick, and filled in for an assistant coach, feeding pucks for the Caps to pummel. Then she talked to the type of media scrum a bottom-pair defenseman might never encounter in his career.

Fatima shoots and scores at #Caps practice! pic.twitter.com/ztKqCAkJCU

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 8, 2017

She told them how she picked up the game, how she fell for Ovechkin and how she met Bondra. She told them about the challenges of playing hockey in the Middle East, and about what lessons she hopes to bring back to the kids she coaches. She talked about breaking barriers and inspiring strangers, and how this was “the best thing that happened in my life.”

Then she headed off for more interviews and a trip to the Maryland suburbs to practice with a local women’s team, while Coach Barry Trotz answered questions about his third-line winger and his team’s defense and upcoming schedule — and about their visitor from across the world.

“This generation of players now, I think, understand that there is diversity in the world and our game is for everybody,” Trotz said. “Just seeing her smile and the guys having fun and doing all that — I think that’s a good message for society right now.”

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Washington Post: When a UAE woman skates with the Capitals, ‘a dream is coming true’

Fatima Al Ali bumps gloves with Alex Ovechkin. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

Washington’s latest experiment with hockey diplomacy started with a 27-year old woman, wearing a Capitals jersey and a hijab, trying to make her heart stop pounding and her legs stop shaking.

Fatima Al Ali, a soft-spoken hockey fanatic from the United Arab Emirates, had flown across the world at the invitation of her favorite team. She had lunched with the team’s executives at the UAE embassy, visited with the team’s owner at her first NHL game, met the team’s stars in their Verizon Center dressing room, and broken into tears at the intensity of it all. Now she sat on the bench at the team’s practice rink Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of still photographers — the sort of crowd that usually emerges only during the playoffs. Her younger brother sat next to her, and Al Ali kept leaning over, asking him to remind her to breathe.

Practice broke, she was beckoned onto the ice, and players tapped their sticks to welcome the newcomer. Then, between whistling shots at the net and fiddling with an unfamiliar stick, she figured out how to calm down.

“Just talking about hockey — something we all share, and something we all love,” she said.

[Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sport. A new generation now chases Olympic glory.]

So she chatted with Russian Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player, about trying to find ice time in Abu Dhabi. (“She was amazing,” Ovechkin said.) She talked about blade curvature with American T.J. Oshie, whose stick she borrowed. (“To see the smile on her face out there, obviously she was doing what she loves,” Oshie said.) She received a playful mid-ice nudge from Canadian Justin Williams, and worked on scooping the puck off the ground with Canadian Tom Wilson. And when she later took a pass from Ovechkin and sent a one-timer into the net, the international roster whooped, Evgeny Kuznetsov pumping his arm in celebration.

CBS Evening News and PBS and CNN and Reuters were at this Capitals practice because of the young woman in the hijab, a striking image at this particular moment. On the ice, though, they weren’t talking about international relations.

“For me, it’s just a hockey player seeing another hockey player go out there and have some fun,” Oshie said. “I don’t really need to or want to get into the political stuff. My first impression was just that it’s cool that someone from so far away can still share the love of the game.”

Hockey ‘makes me alive’

This started thousands of miles away with “The Mighty Ducks” — the movie, not the team. Al Ali speaks flawless English, which she attributed to a movie obsession, and as a kid, she fixated on hockey movies: “Slap Shot,” “Miracle,” and the goofy 1992 Emilio Estevez vehicle about an unlikely team of skaters.

“Hockey was something different, more interesting than soccer,” she said.

She’d been skating since she was 7, but the game remained mostly Hollywood in her mind.

Then, in 2008, she saw a brochure at the mall, advertising an upcoming men’s tournament. She showed up at the tournament with her camera, and organizers asked her to take photos of their team. That team became a club known as the Abu Dhabi Storms, and Al Ali became its photographer. In 2010 the club established a fledgling women’s team — featuring both teenagers and women in their 30s — and the players repeatedly asked their photographer to join them on the ice.

“You guys can’t even skate; why would I want to join the team?” she asked them, but the requests wouldn’t stop. Finally she told them to get her equipment, and she started practicing with grade-schoolers half her size, who looked at her in puzzlement. She’d been playing competitive sports since she was 3; soccer and basketball, diving and golf. (“I have this code in my head: If I start something, I have to be good at it,” she said.) Hockey felt different.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she said. “It almost just makes me alive, makes me have energy, excited. I don’t know — I feel like I’m home. That’s my place. This is where I should be. So from that time, I cannot stay away from the rink.”

[Marriage, motherhood, education, maybe sports: Female Muslim athletes’ expected priorities]

Abu Dhabi, she said, has one hockey rink, with one sheet of ice, which is usually occupied by men’s teams. The closest women’s competition is in Dubai, about an hour away, and is not particularly elite. (“A bunch of old ladies,” Al Ali quipped.) Still, she did everything she could to stay around the game. She coached children. She skated with men, who worried about injuring her. She worked with equipment managers. She began officiating, both international girls’ tournaments and the local league, made up mostly of expats. She tried to break up an on-ice fight and got punched in the head, which led some of the men’s players to suggest maybe this wasn’t the place for a toothpick-thin young woman.

“I’m not getting out,” she told them. “This is hockey.” 

She also became an NHL devotee, streaming games as soon as she arrived at work in the morning, which meant she needed a team. She knew of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the NHL’s two most famous stars — and watched YouTube videos of both men to help her choose. “Both are great players, but one was a scorer,” she said. “I wanted to be a scorer.” Ovechkin’s Capitals became her favorite team.

She watched more videos, too, of stickhandling tricks performed by Crosby and Pavel Datsyuk and random YouTubers. “Okay, I should try this,” she thought. Years of practice later, there she was at her home rink, wearing a hijab and sandals, spinning around a puck that seemed glued to her stick. Retired Caps star Peter Bondra happened to be in the rink that day, working a hockey clinic in conjunction with his former team, and someone told him to look at Al Ali. 

“I stopped whatever we had been doing,” Bondra recalled. “The way she handled the puck, it was amazing. … I said, ‘Hold on, this is something. I have to start talking with the lady.’ ”

He approached and asked if he could take a video of her tricks, something to post on his Twitter account. She said sure. “It’s safe to say she has better hands than me!” Bondra wrote. As the video went viral and U.S. hockey reporters took notice, the two struck up a friendship, a 40-something Slovak star and a 20-something Emirati woman.

This is Fatima. She represents the UAE on their women’s national team & it’s safe to say she has better hands than me! @Capitals @MSE @NHL pic.twitter.com/m4N2IddeRl

— Peter Bondra (@PeterBondra12) November 13, 2016

“She just was a natural,” Bondra said. “You feel like you’re talking to a hockey guy, a hockey player. We can relate easy in that conversation, in that hockey talk.”

When Bondra learned that her favorite team was the Capitals and that she had never been to an NHL game, he promised to take her to Verizon Center if she ever visited D.C. A few days later, she texted to ask if the offer stood. “Of course, that always will stand,” he told her. By that time, the team was working to bring her to Washington.

‘I’m freaking out’

Fatima Al Ali with UAE ambassador to the U.S.  Yousef Al Otaiba. (By Haitham Al Mussawi / Embassy of the United Arab Emirates)

Al Ali and her younger brother Mohammed arrived in Washington this week. They went to Monday’s Wizards-Cavaliers game. They had lunch at the UAE embassy Tuesday, where Al Ali presented Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba with a signed jersey from her team, filled with neat autographs and smiley faces. The siblings listened to the ambassador — a Georgetown graduate who is close with several Caps executives — talk about how much he loves her story, how he wants to bring Al Ali’s team to the States for an exhibition tour.

“I don’t think we’re good enough,” she told him.

“It’s not about being good enough,” he said, “it’s about …”

“The experience,” she agreed.

“I’m really serious,” he said, instructing an aide to start working up a plan. “It would be good for some of our diplomacy efforts … especially at a moment like this politically.”

Indeed, Al Ali’s visit came as the country debates President Trump’s immigration order temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. (The UAE, a U.S. ally, was not one of the seven countries.) Al Ali didn’t want to talk about politics, but her brother said he was nervous coming to Washington in this climate, and also hopeful that their visit could be significant. (“I believe it might give people a different look at how it is in the Middle East or the UAE,” he said. “We’re the same as you guys.”)  

[Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered]

And yet as Al Ali clutched her hands together inside the embassy and thought about sharing the ice with her favorite players, she seemed less like a diplomat than a star-struck fan from Rockville or Reston.

“I’m freaking out,” she confessed. “I’ve been trying to come to D.C. since I started hockey … and then suddenly this thing happens. Unbelievable. A dream is coming true.”

Tuesday night she met Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom in the team’s dressing room. Wednesday morning, team officials presented her with a personalized jersey and told her to grab a player’s stick and take it onto the ice. She passed the puck back and forth with Ovechkin, struggled to recreate her tricks with Oshie’s curved stick, and filled in for an assistant coach, feeding pucks for the Caps to pummel. Then she talked to the type of media scrum a bottom-pair defenseman might never encounter in his career.

Fatima shoots and scores at #Caps practice! pic.twitter.com/ztKqCAkJCU

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 8, 2017

She told them how she picked up the game, how she fell for Ovechkin and how she met Bondra. She told them about the challenges of playing hockey in the Middle East, and about what lessons she hopes to bring back to the kids she coaches. She talked about breaking barriers and inspiring strangers, and how this was “the best thing that happened in my life.”

Then she headed off for more interviews and a trip to the Maryland suburbs to practice with a local women’s team, while Coach Barry Trotz answered questions about his third-line winger and his team’s defense and upcoming schedule — and about their visitor from across the world.

“This generation of players now, I think, understand that there is diversity in the world and our game is for everybody,” Trotz said. “Just seeing her smile and the guys having fun and doing all that — I think that’s a good message for society right now.”

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