Banned - Part 1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Pairing: Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews
Rating: teen
Word Count: 10,674
A03 here!
“Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: misleading use of geography,” reads his third ban of the month.
Kaner stares at his phone's screen for a long moment before angrily muttering, “but it fucking is Winterpeg.” He's not sure if this is more or less embarrassing than the time Jonny banned him from the hockey forum for unsporting conduct for insulting Canada's Olympic candidates.
Written for the Hockey Holiday RPF swap for zaogao for the prompt “Blackhawks, Toews/Kane, Toews totally loves messing around with Kaner/pulling his pigtails.” This turned into them pulling each other’s pigtails as they tend to do. This fic also involves some timeline rearranging around injuries resulting in Jonny never going pro.
With thanks to akitron for beta-reading, mrsvc for cheerleading, and Suzelle for answering my increasingly specific questions about Chicago.
Jonny comes home late to a dark apartment and his answering machine blinking at him again.
He doesn’t have to check it to know who’s been calling him. There’s probably more messages on his cell phone too, but he chucked that somewhere under the bed after the last phone call and he hasn’t bothered fishing it out yet. He hits the ‘play all’ button and listens to his father talk around what he actually means, couching it in buzzword terms like “financial responsibility,” “not too late to go back,” and “long term career planning” when what he really means is “you’re not living up to your potential.” It’s not that he doesn’t love his father - it’s just that they’ve been having this same conversation for months now, circling around the actual issues, and he’s not sure if he can ever bring himself to explain why he walked away in a way that his father would understand.
He hits delete.
--
Maybe it’s counterproductive to go right to a hockey forum to deal with his family causing stress over hockey, but the forum is the best thing Jonny’s had in his life since he moved to Chicago. He’s still a little - okay, honestly a lot - bitter about leaving Canada again, about moving for something that felt more like running away than about coming here for a new job and fresh start. He made an account on the message boards back when he was still in school in Winnipeg. At first it was just because he missed playing, but now he’s come to enjoy the freedom of anonymity. On the forum he’s not Jonny Toews, the potential NHL draft who burned out; he can just be taz3r, a dude who is maybe still too intense and just the wrong side of obsessive about hockey but who actually is respected for the time and effort he puts into explaining his opinions on how every play could be better in excruciating detail.
He’s sure he’d get grief from his old teammates from North Dakota about how staying so informed isn’t healthy for someone in his situation, but he still loves hockey and he couldn’t stay away even if he wanted to. Jonny grabs a beer and turns on ESPN on mute so he can check the scores, then logs into the forum and proceeds to crucify some idiot who thinks that the Leafs actually have a chance of making it to the playoffs. By the time he’s typed up a multi-paragraph list of all the players the Leafs management would have to sell their souls to get on the team in order to be competitive with anything but a munchkin team, he’s feeling a little more human.
--
Jonathan’s got his life in Chicago scheduled down to the minute. Having everything planned around school and hockey practices was so standard that he’s been stockholmed into finding it calming now to know exactly how his days will go. He’d spent his first week in Chicago aggressively researching local restaurants, grocery stores, hockey rinks and running paths and his commute, and laid them all out until he fine-tuned the most ideal weekday routine. The downside of course is that when things mess up his schedule, he’s not great at relaxing or rolling with the punches. He’d done his usual run this morning, dragging himself out to angrily pound the pavement over by Lake Michigan, half awake at best if you wanted to be charitable about it. Then he’d gotten caught up in traffic to and from work only to get out to Dominick’s and find out the entire chain’s closing down by the end of the year. Sure, it’s still winter and he’ll have nearly a year to find somewhere else to shop, but he hates the idea of figuring out a new commute just so he can try to make it out to the Green City Market after work. Jonny’s never been a great cook and mostly he just drops things on the grill and steams a lot of vegetables, but he still tries to watch what he eats and make sure it’s all fresh and organic so he can stay in decent shape for his rec league games. He hasn’t even set anything on fire since the unfortunate pasta incident in January, so he’s doing well enough.
He’s feeling unsettled now, though, so he caves and just picks up takeout on the way home and eats it one-handed over his laptop. Jonny tries to relax and watch some old movie his mom had recommended on Netflix, but some days he still gets too dizzy for things with fast movement and he ends up clicking over to the forum instead.
Jonny has some hockey in his life still - he plays on a rec team that meets twice a week with optional additional practice times, and they have a casual agreement to play other rec leagues on the weekends. It’s not ideal, but he’s hoping if he’s stuck in Chicago long enough he’ll be able to build it up to more frequent meetings. The biggest problem is that occasionally someone recognizes him and he has to smile and pretend he left his chance at pro hockey behind because he was excited to go into physical therapy and that he’s thrilled about being on a low-end rec league. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate having the chance to play, because he does, but he hates doing that song and dance.
He’s started coaching a kid’s hockey class too, and they’re also very casual, mostly kids who want to have fun skating. He gets to show them neat stick-handling tricks and watch them be enthusiastic about everything, so that’s less stressful. He doesn’t have to worry about balance issues for such simple skating - he probably shouldn’t be playing in the rec league at all, but it’s a compromise with himself to still play a little hockey. Neither really has anyone close enough to his level to do serious talks about strategy, though.
There’s a new person who’s been posting on the forum the last two weeks, and Jonny’s not really sure what to make of him aside from his atrocious typing. The forum is small and has always been small, started by a friend of Jonny’s he played with as a kid who wanted a place for actual discussion that wasn’t connected to a news site - just about the game, none of the gossip or bullshit you’d find in a major forum. The members tend to be few but serious, mostly because his friend’s always been quick to ban people who derail discussions for bullshit like paparazzi photos. When people get permabanned, the link to file a complaint just takes them to Deadspin alongside a popup about moving somewhere more their speed. It’s mean, maybe, but Jonny’s always appreciated having a place that he knows he can talk about his love of the game and have actual conversations without having to muddle through all that mess. He’s been a mod for a couple months now and it’s great to be able to get rid of that sort of thing.
It’s always exciting to get new members, if they’re serious about wanting to participate, because they haven’t had the time to get fed up with how prickly he can be. They still make an effort to try and engage him in debates without realizing he’ll pick apart every team’s plays mercilessly and getting bitter about it. Something about this dude gets his hackles up, though, and like hell if Jonny knows why.
It’s probably partly his choice of username. Jonny’s seen some annoying ones in his day, but hockeygod88 might be an unmatched level of hero-worship around these boards. He can’t say he’s surprised to see just how obnoxious the guy is about the Blackhawks. They’re a good team, and as much as he feels displaced and out of sorts about Chicago he can still admit that they’ve got a solid first line, but the way this guy types you’d think they all rescued kittens in their free time and singlehandedly elevated hockey to an art form, which - no.
He deals with it the same way he deals with most unpleasant things these days - ignoring it and commenting in other threads, as if by not acknowledging it it’ll just go away. Hockeygod88 seems to know the game inside and out, at least when it comes to the Blackhawks, and he hopes that eventually the guy will settle down a little and stop being such a fanboy for long enough for them to have a less biased discussion.
Ignoring him is going well enough until hockeygod88 starts talking shit about the potential Team Canada Olympic picks for next year, and then - well.
Across the city, Patrick Kane suddenly makes an undignified squawk and nearly drops his phone off the bed when the words 'Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: unsporting conduct' pop up on his screen.
--
It’s not like Pat ever expected to get into posting on the forum. It seemed really dorky, honestly. He’d just been fucking around on the internet when he was bored late one night and Erica was too busy to answer his texts, and he’d figured he’d troll some forums like he used to when he was a rookie and less worried about his public image. It was stupid, sure, but so were most of his 3am decisions these days.
He’s actually been enjoying it, though. He went in pulling hard for the Blackhawks - and please, as if he’d ever do anything less than represent his team in all their glory, even while trolling - but he’d found out quickly that the posters on this particular forum actually knew their hockey. Patrick’s blind guessing here, but he wouldn’t be surprised if some of these guys had played in minors for a while. He can’t believe that asshole mod banned him though when all he did was make a couple cracks about Canada and - okay, no, he’s not actually that surprised he got banned, but he was being serious in most of his other posts. He suspects taz3r is some sort of sports writer or announcer, because sure, the guy seems to know a hell of a lot about hockey but he’s way too intense and formal in his writing to be the sort of dude Pat plays with. He cannot believe he just got banned by some scrawny nerd he probably would’ve made fun of back in school.
Pat consoles himself by picturing what that guy’s face would look like if he knew he’d just banned the real Patrick Kane, though, and it’s enough that he’s not even annoyed anymore. It’s almost funny enough for him to consider admitting the account’s actually his, but then he couldn’t post on it anymore and that’s… Pat is a little surprised to find out just how much he doesn’t want to lose that. His life’s been a mess lately, and there’s some part of him that really wants to be appreciated just for himself and not elevated or judged for being Patrick Kane, fuckup NHL player. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to care about an anonymous forum, but he’s spent this whole season under the shadow of his drinking and that damned taxi incident, and being respected somewhere where he isn’t automatically judged for all that suddenly feels like it matters a hell of a lot.
He tempers his annoyance by texting Erica a bunch of times to check in on her. He also fulfills his big brother duties by detailing exactly how dead her date to the school dance will be if he does anything inappropriate like breath or dare to have any semblance of a libido in her presence. By the time he’s reminded her that he has a lot of frequent flyer miles and isn’t above using them to find this boy and give him the shovel talk, he’s relaxed again.
He definitely doesn’t check the forum on his way to and from the rink each day until his ban is over, because that would be ridiculous.
--
Jonny has alway been a general fan of various Canadian hockey players, more of an admirer of strong individuals than a diehard fan of any one team. In the wake of hockeygod88’s ban running out, though, he finds himself going hard for the Jets under the excuse that they’re his hometown team.
It’s actually because it seems to piss the guy off so much that someone who seems as knowledgeable about hockey as Jonny would be an unapologetic Jets fan. Jonny is in fact not much of a Jets fan at all. He’s been to a few games, of course, back before he moved to Chicago. Maybe he’d have been happy playing for them if he’d gotten drafted there. They’re not spectacular - their lines just haven’t been gelling well this season and nobody has any illusions about them making a run for the cup. It’s still Canadian hockey, though, and he can get down with that. Jonny thinks it might be because he misses all the chirping from his old team, but this back and forth with hockeygod88 arguing about the Jets and the Blackhawks makes him feel like he’s back in the locker room again. Logging on from his phone at work just to reply to their latest thread is the most exciting thing he’s done this winter, and if that means he has to Google things and pretend he cares way more about the Jets than any reasonable person would, well, he can channel his Canadian pride and blunder through.
Jonny chirps hockeygod88 about being the worst Blackhawks fan, too - for all his big talk about his home team, he’s never online during games to post about them live, and seriously, what sort of a fan does he think he is?
Patrick laughs so hard when he sees Jonny’s post on the bus back to the airport that Seabs has to lean over the aisle and slap him on the back a few times to make sure he doesn’t choke, it’s golden. He’s the best Blackhawks fan, seriously, this stranger on the internet doesn’t know shit.
Their threads lately have gotten so aggressive that other commenters will drop out within a few posts, and then it’ll just be them arguing until they hit a standstill or one of them begrudgingly admits the other has a point.
It’s working for them in a weird way. As aggressive as they get arguing about the Jets, it’s the most Jonny can remember talking to anyone who isn’t family since he moved here. He only bans hockeygod88 once for that thread, which just might be a new record as well. When an alert pops up on Pat’s phone with the words 'Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: misleading use of geography,' he’s out at the bar with Sharpy and a few of the new rookies who’re trying their best to convince the bartender that puppydog eyes are an acceptable substitute for legitimate ID’s. He stares at his screen for a long moment before angrily muttering, “but it fucking is Winterpeg” as Sharpy raises his judgmental eyebrows in his direction.
“Are you seriously fighting with someone about Canada? You live in Buffalo, it’s cold there too and - wait, who are you even texting?”
“Nobody,” Pat whines, shoving his phone back in his pocket. “‘s not like he’s gonna say anything back, he’s not talking to me now.” He’s saved from Sharpy prying by the sudden arrival of a tray of shots from his new favorite bartender, and by pretending he’s entirely too drunk to answer questions until he makes it true.
--
Kaner’s pretty sure his sisters can tell when he’s been banned from the forum now just because he texts them way more than usual when he can’t bother taz3r. The guy may be an asshole, but he’s sort of Pat’s asshole friend now, for whatever that’s worth. They’re at each other’s throats all the time about hockey, mostly about taz3r’s weirdly antagonistic support of the Jets as the pinnacle of hockey against all reason and stats, but he gets the feeling that taz3r wouldn’t even give him the time of day if he didn’t think Pat knew what he was talking about. It makes him feel appreciated in this unhealthy way where he’s somehow equating being yelled at as a sign of friendship. This whole… thing they’ve got going is strange, but Pat’s spent this whole season feeling like he has to defend his value as a hockey player over his private life, and this feels different. As much as taz3r yells at him and sometimes thinks his ideas are stupid, and sometimes means it rather than just arguing for the sake of arguing, he never thinks that Pat’s stupid and he always wants to hear his opinions. That’s a powerful thing after the press gauntlet he’s been unsuccessfully dodging.
It’s also great that the forum doesn’t allow speculations about players’ personal lives, nothing more prying than guessing at how long someone might be out after an injury. He never has to worry about logging in to find more shitty cell phone photos of himself drunk in some bar and be reminded by strangers on the internet that he’s fucking up his life and possibly his career. His family’s already griefing him enough about it, and he has to sit still and listen to it because he knows they’re right even if he’s not sure how to stop himself from continuing this spiral of bad life choices. Pat doesn’t need more of that on a place he goes to relax.
He’s been banned again for 'lying to forum members about holidays,' which is basically code for 'I told taz3r that Canadian Thanksgiving wasn’t Real Thanksgiving and he got as pissy as I should have expected.'
“It seriously isn’t real Thanksgiving, though,” he complains to Erica. She’s graciously agreed to turn on Skype while she does her homework so he can vent. “I mean, it’s not real Thanksgiving in America, obviously.” She hmmm’s at him and tells him he should be nicer to his boyfriend, even if it is weird that he’s that patriotic about being Canadian. Patrick nearly falls out of his chair.
“I - what?! He’s not my boyfriend, Erica, I don’t even know him! I don’t even know if he’s a him!” He seriously regrets that he told her he’d “totally hit that” while watching an old Harrison Ford movie because she’s drawn terrible conclusions about every male friend he’s made outside of hockey ever since.
She sits up a little straighter and fixes him with that judgemental look his family’s gotten so good at lately. “What is that supposed to mean? You talk about him all the time but you don’t even know him? I thought you were on that forum because someone you already knew invited you. Pat, that can’t be healthy spending so much time talking to some stranger you know nothing about.”
“I just - honestly, Erica, he’s just some dude on a hockey forum, it’s not a big deal. I only talk about him because he’s always pissing me off. He’s like one of those giant fluffy cats that’s mad all the time and bites you when you try and pet it. He’s not harmful or anything, he’s just kinda made of irrational anger.”
Erica moves on from Judgemental Look 1 to Judgemental Look 2: The Staredown. “Why don’t you just find a different forum then? He doesn’t sound like a very nice person. I don’t understand why you’d put up with that.”
Pat opens his mouth and then hesitates, because - he’s not sure how to put it into words anyway, how it feels that taz3r spends so much time talking to him and actually taking him seriously when no one else seems to, and he’s not sure that he wants to explain it to his sister. It feels like it’s teetering on the edge of something precious, and he doesn’t want to ruin it by talking about it before he’s figured it out himself, so he just gets quiet for a while until they say goodnight.
Patrick gets his access back to the forum a few days later, but he sits there with a blank private message open for a long time before he types out ‘hey r u a dude’ and clicks send. It feels like ages before he gets a ‘What the fuck.’ back in reply and, yeah, he should have expected that. ‘Sry just wondering bc my sister asked who i was talking to n i realized i dont know ur name man,’ he sends back.
He gets two private messages in quick succession. The first has corrections for all the spelling and text speak he’s used, and the second just says ‘Jonny.’
--
If Patrick thought it’d be easier to talk about personal things once he knew Jonny’s name, he was wrong. Jonny hasn’t tried to initiate any more private messages with him and like hell he’s sticking his neck out a second time when it’s clearly not his turn. They’re back to just talking about hockey on the public boards again, and it’s great except for the part where Pat wants to know more about this aggressive Canadian jackass who corrects his spelling.
He clearly has terrible taste.
He’s almost as desperate to get Jonny to talk to him about something other than hockey as he is to not break and send him a message first, though, so he starts peppering little personal things about his life into his forum posts when he can. This is a terrible idea, but he figures as long as he doesn’t say anything traceable then he’ll be okay. Unfortunately, traceable for him boils down to anything he’s ever mentioned no matter how casually in an interview, so he’s left with the most mundane things that wouldn’t be enough to identify anyone and the most personal that he doesn’t want to talk about on a public forum, and nothing in between that would be normal small talk. He gives Jonny little bits of information about himself though when he can, wrapping up these pieces of himself like gifts amongst their hockey conversations.
Pat starts with things like mentioning his favorite flavor of jam when someone talks about Crosby’s pre-game ritual PB&J sandwich, and about the time a friend hid the spare pucks in their coach’s car as a prank. When Jonny complains about the way someone wraps their stick though, he finds himself telling Jonny about the time he used his extra roll to tape his sister’s dolls up out of her reach so he wouldn’t have to stay indoors to play pretend with her instead of playing shinny. He felt so bad afterwards that he invited her out to play with him even though the other kids were too much bigger, and then he spent the whole time protecting her and barely playing.
He feels like he’s spilling everything he is out on the text box, and it’s too much and too personal and not enough for everything he wants from Jonny all at the same time.
There’s a message from Jonny in his inbox later, and all it says is 'Thanks.'
--
Jonny tries to not think about how this may have gone too far the night he starts spite-watching Jets games just so he can brag about the team more accurately. It’s not like - it’s not a problem or anything, and it’s not that weird to get defensive about your hometown team. It definitely isn’t like he’s trying to impress a stranger on a forum.
It’s not like he’d be into this dude anyway, because for one, he has no idea if hockeygod88 is even around his own age and single let alone into guys, and two, anyone who thinks of Patrick Kane as a god probably has the worst fashion sense on the planet. He’d show up on a date in - who even knows, some sort of terrible patterned suit and a ratty mullet. Jonny’s been trying to picture the guy as some middle aged man with an unfortunate haircut in hopes that he’d stop logging into the forum right when he gets home, but no dice.
He’s watching the game highlights again on his phone the next day, waiting for his next client to arrive, when one of the other physical therapists leans over and asks him about them. T.J. “but seriously, just Oshie is fine, dude” is clearly trying hard to make small-talk now that he knows they both watch hockey, so he gives a few half-hearted replies. Jonny’s been - maybe not unfriendly, per say, but in his annoyance about only being able to find work in Chicago he’s been holding off on getting attached and actually settling in. Being content in Chicago feels like giving up on moving back to Winnipeg, and he really does miss it, has felt unmoored these past few months despite overscheduling his life to try and keep himself from thinking too hard.
When T.J. offers him his spare ticket to the Blackhawks game that night, Jonny accepts - because being content in Chicago also means that he’s deciding that he deserves to be happy. He’s not there yet, he knows he’s still hauling a hell of a lot of baggage around, but maybe it’s time to take the first step.
Oshie is actually fun to hang out with, in a dudebro sort of a way that Jonny thought he’d left behind when he left hockey. He’s absolutely positive they’re bringing out the worst in each other, and if he’d known Oshie back when he was younger and more impulsive, he has no doubt they’d have gotten even drunker and probably ended the night by getting themselves arrested for something stupid and entirely avoidable. It’s fun though, and yeah, this is definitely a sign he needs to get out more. Jonny may enjoy spending a lot of time alone, but there’s clearly a difference between a lot and too much even for him. He enjoys the forum and it’s good that he has some sort of social outlet, but he’s got to do this more often. It’s either that or join a book club or whatever the fuck else adults do when they’re bad at making friends with other vaguely competent human beings, and he doesn’t think a book club would really approve of how loudly he’s cheering when someone on the visiting team gets checked into the boards hard enough that there’s blood on the ice.
They go out for more unadvisable drinks after the game and catch the end of the press post-game interviews, idly watching as someone starts grilling Patrick Kane about whether his drinking is causing him problems on the ice and what he’s planning to do to pull his weight again. Jonny doesn’t even like the guy from all the bullshitting he’s seen him do in interviews in the past, but that question’s too harsh because what they’re really asking is whether hockey is important to Kane at all, and Jonny knows enough about disappointing people’s expectations to know how deep that cuts.
He still logs into the forum just to check in before he goes to sleep. He’s curled up in bed already, browsing new threads on his phone when he gets a private message from hockeygod88 and thumbs it open, frowning. The guy’s joking about how Jonny waited around for him before he logged on, but it sounds self deprecating. Jonny ends up telling him that he’d finally gone to a local hockey game with his coworker and that he figured it was time to get used to cheering for his new hometown team. It’s the most he’s revealed about himself, and he feels oddly exposed.
He doesn’t get a reply, and he’s not sure if it’s the beers or how tired he is that compels him to ask, 'Are you okay?'
'Rough nite sry' comes back almost immediately. He’s not sure what to make of that - the Blackhawks won, this has to be personal and not about hockey and he doesn’t know what to do about that. It’s not his problem either, is the thing. Jonny’s never been good at comforting people, even when they’re people he knows and cares about. He feels uncomfortable knowing that much, and he wishes he hadn’t asked. He’s about to log out and go to sleep when he gets another message and all it says is 'im really struggling jonny idk...' Jonny wrestles with his hatred of being dragged into emotional messes and his sense of responsibility for members of his own forum before he pictures a little boy playing shinny with his baby sister, hovering protectively the way his own brother did when he was small.
'I’m taz3r on Skype too,' he sends back. It’s invitation enough.
[ Part 2]
Pairing: Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews
Rating: teen
Word Count: 10,674
A03 here!
“Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: misleading use of geography,” reads his third ban of the month.
Kaner stares at his phone's screen for a long moment before angrily muttering, “but it fucking is Winterpeg.” He's not sure if this is more or less embarrassing than the time Jonny banned him from the hockey forum for unsporting conduct for insulting Canada's Olympic candidates.
Written for the Hockey Holiday RPF swap for zaogao for the prompt “Blackhawks, Toews/Kane, Toews totally loves messing around with Kaner/pulling his pigtails.” This turned into them pulling each other’s pigtails as they tend to do. This fic also involves some timeline rearranging around injuries resulting in Jonny never going pro.
With thanks to akitron for beta-reading, mrsvc for cheerleading, and Suzelle for answering my increasingly specific questions about Chicago.
Jonny comes home late to a dark apartment and his answering machine blinking at him again.
He doesn’t have to check it to know who’s been calling him. There’s probably more messages on his cell phone too, but he chucked that somewhere under the bed after the last phone call and he hasn’t bothered fishing it out yet. He hits the ‘play all’ button and listens to his father talk around what he actually means, couching it in buzzword terms like “financial responsibility,” “not too late to go back,” and “long term career planning” when what he really means is “you’re not living up to your potential.” It’s not that he doesn’t love his father - it’s just that they’ve been having this same conversation for months now, circling around the actual issues, and he’s not sure if he can ever bring himself to explain why he walked away in a way that his father would understand.
He hits delete.
--
Maybe it’s counterproductive to go right to a hockey forum to deal with his family causing stress over hockey, but the forum is the best thing Jonny’s had in his life since he moved to Chicago. He’s still a little - okay, honestly a lot - bitter about leaving Canada again, about moving for something that felt more like running away than about coming here for a new job and fresh start. He made an account on the message boards back when he was still in school in Winnipeg. At first it was just because he missed playing, but now he’s come to enjoy the freedom of anonymity. On the forum he’s not Jonny Toews, the potential NHL draft who burned out; he can just be taz3r, a dude who is maybe still too intense and just the wrong side of obsessive about hockey but who actually is respected for the time and effort he puts into explaining his opinions on how every play could be better in excruciating detail.
He’s sure he’d get grief from his old teammates from North Dakota about how staying so informed isn’t healthy for someone in his situation, but he still loves hockey and he couldn’t stay away even if he wanted to. Jonny grabs a beer and turns on ESPN on mute so he can check the scores, then logs into the forum and proceeds to crucify some idiot who thinks that the Leafs actually have a chance of making it to the playoffs. By the time he’s typed up a multi-paragraph list of all the players the Leafs management would have to sell their souls to get on the team in order to be competitive with anything but a munchkin team, he’s feeling a little more human.
--
Jonathan’s got his life in Chicago scheduled down to the minute. Having everything planned around school and hockey practices was so standard that he’s been stockholmed into finding it calming now to know exactly how his days will go. He’d spent his first week in Chicago aggressively researching local restaurants, grocery stores, hockey rinks and running paths and his commute, and laid them all out until he fine-tuned the most ideal weekday routine. The downside of course is that when things mess up his schedule, he’s not great at relaxing or rolling with the punches. He’d done his usual run this morning, dragging himself out to angrily pound the pavement over by Lake Michigan, half awake at best if you wanted to be charitable about it. Then he’d gotten caught up in traffic to and from work only to get out to Dominick’s and find out the entire chain’s closing down by the end of the year. Sure, it’s still winter and he’ll have nearly a year to find somewhere else to shop, but he hates the idea of figuring out a new commute just so he can try to make it out to the Green City Market after work. Jonny’s never been a great cook and mostly he just drops things on the grill and steams a lot of vegetables, but he still tries to watch what he eats and make sure it’s all fresh and organic so he can stay in decent shape for his rec league games. He hasn’t even set anything on fire since the unfortunate pasta incident in January, so he’s doing well enough.
He’s feeling unsettled now, though, so he caves and just picks up takeout on the way home and eats it one-handed over his laptop. Jonny tries to relax and watch some old movie his mom had recommended on Netflix, but some days he still gets too dizzy for things with fast movement and he ends up clicking over to the forum instead.
Jonny has some hockey in his life still - he plays on a rec team that meets twice a week with optional additional practice times, and they have a casual agreement to play other rec leagues on the weekends. It’s not ideal, but he’s hoping if he’s stuck in Chicago long enough he’ll be able to build it up to more frequent meetings. The biggest problem is that occasionally someone recognizes him and he has to smile and pretend he left his chance at pro hockey behind because he was excited to go into physical therapy and that he’s thrilled about being on a low-end rec league. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate having the chance to play, because he does, but he hates doing that song and dance.
He’s started coaching a kid’s hockey class too, and they’re also very casual, mostly kids who want to have fun skating. He gets to show them neat stick-handling tricks and watch them be enthusiastic about everything, so that’s less stressful. He doesn’t have to worry about balance issues for such simple skating - he probably shouldn’t be playing in the rec league at all, but it’s a compromise with himself to still play a little hockey. Neither really has anyone close enough to his level to do serious talks about strategy, though.
There’s a new person who’s been posting on the forum the last two weeks, and Jonny’s not really sure what to make of him aside from his atrocious typing. The forum is small and has always been small, started by a friend of Jonny’s he played with as a kid who wanted a place for actual discussion that wasn’t connected to a news site - just about the game, none of the gossip or bullshit you’d find in a major forum. The members tend to be few but serious, mostly because his friend’s always been quick to ban people who derail discussions for bullshit like paparazzi photos. When people get permabanned, the link to file a complaint just takes them to Deadspin alongside a popup about moving somewhere more their speed. It’s mean, maybe, but Jonny’s always appreciated having a place that he knows he can talk about his love of the game and have actual conversations without having to muddle through all that mess. He’s been a mod for a couple months now and it’s great to be able to get rid of that sort of thing.
It’s always exciting to get new members, if they’re serious about wanting to participate, because they haven’t had the time to get fed up with how prickly he can be. They still make an effort to try and engage him in debates without realizing he’ll pick apart every team’s plays mercilessly and getting bitter about it. Something about this dude gets his hackles up, though, and like hell if Jonny knows why.
It’s probably partly his choice of username. Jonny’s seen some annoying ones in his day, but hockeygod88 might be an unmatched level of hero-worship around these boards. He can’t say he’s surprised to see just how obnoxious the guy is about the Blackhawks. They’re a good team, and as much as he feels displaced and out of sorts about Chicago he can still admit that they’ve got a solid first line, but the way this guy types you’d think they all rescued kittens in their free time and singlehandedly elevated hockey to an art form, which - no.
He deals with it the same way he deals with most unpleasant things these days - ignoring it and commenting in other threads, as if by not acknowledging it it’ll just go away. Hockeygod88 seems to know the game inside and out, at least when it comes to the Blackhawks, and he hopes that eventually the guy will settle down a little and stop being such a fanboy for long enough for them to have a less biased discussion.
Ignoring him is going well enough until hockeygod88 starts talking shit about the potential Team Canada Olympic picks for next year, and then - well.
Across the city, Patrick Kane suddenly makes an undignified squawk and nearly drops his phone off the bed when the words 'Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: unsporting conduct' pop up on his screen.
--
It’s not like Pat ever expected to get into posting on the forum. It seemed really dorky, honestly. He’d just been fucking around on the internet when he was bored late one night and Erica was too busy to answer his texts, and he’d figured he’d troll some forums like he used to when he was a rookie and less worried about his public image. It was stupid, sure, but so were most of his 3am decisions these days.
He’s actually been enjoying it, though. He went in pulling hard for the Blackhawks - and please, as if he’d ever do anything less than represent his team in all their glory, even while trolling - but he’d found out quickly that the posters on this particular forum actually knew their hockey. Patrick’s blind guessing here, but he wouldn’t be surprised if some of these guys had played in minors for a while. He can’t believe that asshole mod banned him though when all he did was make a couple cracks about Canada and - okay, no, he’s not actually that surprised he got banned, but he was being serious in most of his other posts. He suspects taz3r is some sort of sports writer or announcer, because sure, the guy seems to know a hell of a lot about hockey but he’s way too intense and formal in his writing to be the sort of dude Pat plays with. He cannot believe he just got banned by some scrawny nerd he probably would’ve made fun of back in school.
Pat consoles himself by picturing what that guy’s face would look like if he knew he’d just banned the real Patrick Kane, though, and it’s enough that he’s not even annoyed anymore. It’s almost funny enough for him to consider admitting the account’s actually his, but then he couldn’t post on it anymore and that’s… Pat is a little surprised to find out just how much he doesn’t want to lose that. His life’s been a mess lately, and there’s some part of him that really wants to be appreciated just for himself and not elevated or judged for being Patrick Kane, fuckup NHL player. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to care about an anonymous forum, but he’s spent this whole season under the shadow of his drinking and that damned taxi incident, and being respected somewhere where he isn’t automatically judged for all that suddenly feels like it matters a hell of a lot.
He tempers his annoyance by texting Erica a bunch of times to check in on her. He also fulfills his big brother duties by detailing exactly how dead her date to the school dance will be if he does anything inappropriate like breath or dare to have any semblance of a libido in her presence. By the time he’s reminded her that he has a lot of frequent flyer miles and isn’t above using them to find this boy and give him the shovel talk, he’s relaxed again.
He definitely doesn’t check the forum on his way to and from the rink each day until his ban is over, because that would be ridiculous.
--
Jonny has alway been a general fan of various Canadian hockey players, more of an admirer of strong individuals than a diehard fan of any one team. In the wake of hockeygod88’s ban running out, though, he finds himself going hard for the Jets under the excuse that they’re his hometown team.
It’s actually because it seems to piss the guy off so much that someone who seems as knowledgeable about hockey as Jonny would be an unapologetic Jets fan. Jonny is in fact not much of a Jets fan at all. He’s been to a few games, of course, back before he moved to Chicago. Maybe he’d have been happy playing for them if he’d gotten drafted there. They’re not spectacular - their lines just haven’t been gelling well this season and nobody has any illusions about them making a run for the cup. It’s still Canadian hockey, though, and he can get down with that. Jonny thinks it might be because he misses all the chirping from his old team, but this back and forth with hockeygod88 arguing about the Jets and the Blackhawks makes him feel like he’s back in the locker room again. Logging on from his phone at work just to reply to their latest thread is the most exciting thing he’s done this winter, and if that means he has to Google things and pretend he cares way more about the Jets than any reasonable person would, well, he can channel his Canadian pride and blunder through.
Jonny chirps hockeygod88 about being the worst Blackhawks fan, too - for all his big talk about his home team, he’s never online during games to post about them live, and seriously, what sort of a fan does he think he is?
Patrick laughs so hard when he sees Jonny’s post on the bus back to the airport that Seabs has to lean over the aisle and slap him on the back a few times to make sure he doesn’t choke, it’s golden. He’s the best Blackhawks fan, seriously, this stranger on the internet doesn’t know shit.
Their threads lately have gotten so aggressive that other commenters will drop out within a few posts, and then it’ll just be them arguing until they hit a standstill or one of them begrudgingly admits the other has a point.
It’s working for them in a weird way. As aggressive as they get arguing about the Jets, it’s the most Jonny can remember talking to anyone who isn’t family since he moved here. He only bans hockeygod88 once for that thread, which just might be a new record as well. When an alert pops up on Pat’s phone with the words 'Temporarily banned by mod taz3r: misleading use of geography,' he’s out at the bar with Sharpy and a few of the new rookies who’re trying their best to convince the bartender that puppydog eyes are an acceptable substitute for legitimate ID’s. He stares at his screen for a long moment before angrily muttering, “but it fucking is Winterpeg” as Sharpy raises his judgmental eyebrows in his direction.
“Are you seriously fighting with someone about Canada? You live in Buffalo, it’s cold there too and - wait, who are you even texting?”
“Nobody,” Pat whines, shoving his phone back in his pocket. “‘s not like he’s gonna say anything back, he’s not talking to me now.” He’s saved from Sharpy prying by the sudden arrival of a tray of shots from his new favorite bartender, and by pretending he’s entirely too drunk to answer questions until he makes it true.
--
Kaner’s pretty sure his sisters can tell when he’s been banned from the forum now just because he texts them way more than usual when he can’t bother taz3r. The guy may be an asshole, but he’s sort of Pat’s asshole friend now, for whatever that’s worth. They’re at each other’s throats all the time about hockey, mostly about taz3r’s weirdly antagonistic support of the Jets as the pinnacle of hockey against all reason and stats, but he gets the feeling that taz3r wouldn’t even give him the time of day if he didn’t think Pat knew what he was talking about. It makes him feel appreciated in this unhealthy way where he’s somehow equating being yelled at as a sign of friendship. This whole… thing they’ve got going is strange, but Pat’s spent this whole season feeling like he has to defend his value as a hockey player over his private life, and this feels different. As much as taz3r yells at him and sometimes thinks his ideas are stupid, and sometimes means it rather than just arguing for the sake of arguing, he never thinks that Pat’s stupid and he always wants to hear his opinions. That’s a powerful thing after the press gauntlet he’s been unsuccessfully dodging.
It’s also great that the forum doesn’t allow speculations about players’ personal lives, nothing more prying than guessing at how long someone might be out after an injury. He never has to worry about logging in to find more shitty cell phone photos of himself drunk in some bar and be reminded by strangers on the internet that he’s fucking up his life and possibly his career. His family’s already griefing him enough about it, and he has to sit still and listen to it because he knows they’re right even if he’s not sure how to stop himself from continuing this spiral of bad life choices. Pat doesn’t need more of that on a place he goes to relax.
He’s been banned again for 'lying to forum members about holidays,' which is basically code for 'I told taz3r that Canadian Thanksgiving wasn’t Real Thanksgiving and he got as pissy as I should have expected.'
“It seriously isn’t real Thanksgiving, though,” he complains to Erica. She’s graciously agreed to turn on Skype while she does her homework so he can vent. “I mean, it’s not real Thanksgiving in America, obviously.” She hmmm’s at him and tells him he should be nicer to his boyfriend, even if it is weird that he’s that patriotic about being Canadian. Patrick nearly falls out of his chair.
“I - what?! He’s not my boyfriend, Erica, I don’t even know him! I don’t even know if he’s a him!” He seriously regrets that he told her he’d “totally hit that” while watching an old Harrison Ford movie because she’s drawn terrible conclusions about every male friend he’s made outside of hockey ever since.
She sits up a little straighter and fixes him with that judgemental look his family’s gotten so good at lately. “What is that supposed to mean? You talk about him all the time but you don’t even know him? I thought you were on that forum because someone you already knew invited you. Pat, that can’t be healthy spending so much time talking to some stranger you know nothing about.”
“I just - honestly, Erica, he’s just some dude on a hockey forum, it’s not a big deal. I only talk about him because he’s always pissing me off. He’s like one of those giant fluffy cats that’s mad all the time and bites you when you try and pet it. He’s not harmful or anything, he’s just kinda made of irrational anger.”
Erica moves on from Judgemental Look 1 to Judgemental Look 2: The Staredown. “Why don’t you just find a different forum then? He doesn’t sound like a very nice person. I don’t understand why you’d put up with that.”
Pat opens his mouth and then hesitates, because - he’s not sure how to put it into words anyway, how it feels that taz3r spends so much time talking to him and actually taking him seriously when no one else seems to, and he’s not sure that he wants to explain it to his sister. It feels like it’s teetering on the edge of something precious, and he doesn’t want to ruin it by talking about it before he’s figured it out himself, so he just gets quiet for a while until they say goodnight.
Patrick gets his access back to the forum a few days later, but he sits there with a blank private message open for a long time before he types out ‘hey r u a dude’ and clicks send. It feels like ages before he gets a ‘What the fuck.’ back in reply and, yeah, he should have expected that. ‘Sry just wondering bc my sister asked who i was talking to n i realized i dont know ur name man,’ he sends back.
He gets two private messages in quick succession. The first has corrections for all the spelling and text speak he’s used, and the second just says ‘Jonny.’
--
If Patrick thought it’d be easier to talk about personal things once he knew Jonny’s name, he was wrong. Jonny hasn’t tried to initiate any more private messages with him and like hell he’s sticking his neck out a second time when it’s clearly not his turn. They’re back to just talking about hockey on the public boards again, and it’s great except for the part where Pat wants to know more about this aggressive Canadian jackass who corrects his spelling.
He clearly has terrible taste.
He’s almost as desperate to get Jonny to talk to him about something other than hockey as he is to not break and send him a message first, though, so he starts peppering little personal things about his life into his forum posts when he can. This is a terrible idea, but he figures as long as he doesn’t say anything traceable then he’ll be okay. Unfortunately, traceable for him boils down to anything he’s ever mentioned no matter how casually in an interview, so he’s left with the most mundane things that wouldn’t be enough to identify anyone and the most personal that he doesn’t want to talk about on a public forum, and nothing in between that would be normal small talk. He gives Jonny little bits of information about himself though when he can, wrapping up these pieces of himself like gifts amongst their hockey conversations.
Pat starts with things like mentioning his favorite flavor of jam when someone talks about Crosby’s pre-game ritual PB&J sandwich, and about the time a friend hid the spare pucks in their coach’s car as a prank. When Jonny complains about the way someone wraps their stick though, he finds himself telling Jonny about the time he used his extra roll to tape his sister’s dolls up out of her reach so he wouldn’t have to stay indoors to play pretend with her instead of playing shinny. He felt so bad afterwards that he invited her out to play with him even though the other kids were too much bigger, and then he spent the whole time protecting her and barely playing.
He feels like he’s spilling everything he is out on the text box, and it’s too much and too personal and not enough for everything he wants from Jonny all at the same time.
There’s a message from Jonny in his inbox later, and all it says is 'Thanks.'
--
Jonny tries to not think about how this may have gone too far the night he starts spite-watching Jets games just so he can brag about the team more accurately. It’s not like - it’s not a problem or anything, and it’s not that weird to get defensive about your hometown team. It definitely isn’t like he’s trying to impress a stranger on a forum.
It’s not like he’d be into this dude anyway, because for one, he has no idea if hockeygod88 is even around his own age and single let alone into guys, and two, anyone who thinks of Patrick Kane as a god probably has the worst fashion sense on the planet. He’d show up on a date in - who even knows, some sort of terrible patterned suit and a ratty mullet. Jonny’s been trying to picture the guy as some middle aged man with an unfortunate haircut in hopes that he’d stop logging into the forum right when he gets home, but no dice.
He’s watching the game highlights again on his phone the next day, waiting for his next client to arrive, when one of the other physical therapists leans over and asks him about them. T.J. “but seriously, just Oshie is fine, dude” is clearly trying hard to make small-talk now that he knows they both watch hockey, so he gives a few half-hearted replies. Jonny’s been - maybe not unfriendly, per say, but in his annoyance about only being able to find work in Chicago he’s been holding off on getting attached and actually settling in. Being content in Chicago feels like giving up on moving back to Winnipeg, and he really does miss it, has felt unmoored these past few months despite overscheduling his life to try and keep himself from thinking too hard.
When T.J. offers him his spare ticket to the Blackhawks game that night, Jonny accepts - because being content in Chicago also means that he’s deciding that he deserves to be happy. He’s not there yet, he knows he’s still hauling a hell of a lot of baggage around, but maybe it’s time to take the first step.
Oshie is actually fun to hang out with, in a dudebro sort of a way that Jonny thought he’d left behind when he left hockey. He’s absolutely positive they’re bringing out the worst in each other, and if he’d known Oshie back when he was younger and more impulsive, he has no doubt they’d have gotten even drunker and probably ended the night by getting themselves arrested for something stupid and entirely avoidable. It’s fun though, and yeah, this is definitely a sign he needs to get out more. Jonny may enjoy spending a lot of time alone, but there’s clearly a difference between a lot and too much even for him. He enjoys the forum and it’s good that he has some sort of social outlet, but he’s got to do this more often. It’s either that or join a book club or whatever the fuck else adults do when they’re bad at making friends with other vaguely competent human beings, and he doesn’t think a book club would really approve of how loudly he’s cheering when someone on the visiting team gets checked into the boards hard enough that there’s blood on the ice.
They go out for more unadvisable drinks after the game and catch the end of the press post-game interviews, idly watching as someone starts grilling Patrick Kane about whether his drinking is causing him problems on the ice and what he’s planning to do to pull his weight again. Jonny doesn’t even like the guy from all the bullshitting he’s seen him do in interviews in the past, but that question’s too harsh because what they’re really asking is whether hockey is important to Kane at all, and Jonny knows enough about disappointing people’s expectations to know how deep that cuts.
He still logs into the forum just to check in before he goes to sleep. He’s curled up in bed already, browsing new threads on his phone when he gets a private message from hockeygod88 and thumbs it open, frowning. The guy’s joking about how Jonny waited around for him before he logged on, but it sounds self deprecating. Jonny ends up telling him that he’d finally gone to a local hockey game with his coworker and that he figured it was time to get used to cheering for his new hometown team. It’s the most he’s revealed about himself, and he feels oddly exposed.
He doesn’t get a reply, and he’s not sure if it’s the beers or how tired he is that compels him to ask, 'Are you okay?'
'Rough nite sry' comes back almost immediately. He’s not sure what to make of that - the Blackhawks won, this has to be personal and not about hockey and he doesn’t know what to do about that. It’s not his problem either, is the thing. Jonny’s never been good at comforting people, even when they’re people he knows and cares about. He feels uncomfortable knowing that much, and he wishes he hadn’t asked. He’s about to log out and go to sleep when he gets another message and all it says is 'im really struggling jonny idk...' Jonny wrestles with his hatred of being dragged into emotional messes and his sense of responsibility for members of his own forum before he pictures a little boy playing shinny with his baby sister, hovering protectively the way his own brother did when he was small.
'I’m taz3r on Skype too,' he sends back. It’s invitation enough.
[ Part 2]