Overwhelming - Part 1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Pairing: Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews
Rating: mature
Word Count: 8,730
A03 here!
Pat turns around and then Jonny’s hand is on his shoulder, twisting him back around. For a moment he thinks he’s actually going to get punched. Then Jonny’s growling “I could say something nice if you were ever good enough to deserve it.”
Patrick narrows his eyes.
“Fine. Prove it. Every time I play better than you in a game for the next month, you have to compliment me.”
For demotu, whose Gay Porn Hard challenge was apparently the push I needed to finally write porn. After several thousand words of plot, because I am emotionally incapable of writing anything that doesn't involve slow burn.
The timeline for this fic (and thus the scoring chart) are based on actual game stats from October 22 to November 30, 2013.
The bet seems like a good idea at the time.
They’d had a blow out fight earlier in the week over Pat’s partying, Jonny complaining about how Patrick never takes anything seriously and how his irresponsibility is going to fuck them all over. He’s been spending a little too much time in bars again, sure, but Pat can hardly tell Jonny that he’s been hanging with the rookies just because he’s been lonely. Jonny’s relationship with his girlfriend fell apart a few weeks ago and Pat’s been trying to give him and his bad moods some space, but it seems like he can’t fucking do anything right.
Jonny’s been an asshole ever since, vicious and pointed with his chirping in a way he doesn’t usually get. It’s not until he digs in with a pointed comment about Madison that Patrick snaps.
“I’m a wreck? You’re the one who can’t be positive about anything,” he hisses. “I’ve been playing well all week and you’re too wrapped up in your own little misery party to even notice!”
Jonny glares at him and opens his mouth for what bodes to be another spectacular on-ice screaming match before Q beckons him over.
“Asshole,” Pat mutters under his breath.
Jonny confronts him in the locker room after the game, tension pulled across his shoulders. He’s right between Patrick and the door, stance wide and feet planted firmly like he’s preparing for a fight instead of another yelling match.
“You haven’t been playing that well,” Jonny tells him with a sneer.
“Fuck you, I had an assist and I won my shootoff! You’re just being angry at me because you can’t deal with your own bullshit and you’re forcing it onto everyone else. You couldn’t say a goddamn nice thing to anyone right now even if I paid you.”
Pat turns around and then Jonny’s hand is on his shoulder, twisting him back around. For a moment he thinks he’s actually going to get punched. Then Jonny’s growling “I could say something nice if you were ever good enough to deserve it.”
Patrick narrows his eyes.
“Fine. Prove it. Every time I play better than you in a game for the next month, you have to compliment me.”
Jonny still looks pissed, but he’s traded his glare for the tightness that’s been at the corners of his mouth ever since he got dumped. “Better is subjective.”
Patrick throws his pads into his locker and picks up his coat. “If you can’t even be civil enough to give me the benefit of the doubt then make a scoring system, jackass. But they have to be good compliments, you can’t half-ass it.”
He doesn’t look back, but by the time he gets home he’s got a text from Jonny that just says ‘Fine.’
“I totally played better than you tonight,” he tells Jonny two days later when they’re winding down from a game against Tampa Bay. Jonny is still in a pissy mood, mostly because they just lost.
“How the fuck was that better?” Jonny sounds aggravated. “We each got one goal and one assist. That’s a tie.”
“Nah man, I got third star and all you got us was a penalty.”
Jonny twitches and Pat wills himself not to flinch back.
“If we’re doing this,” says Jonny, “then I’m making an actual scoring system and once we implement it you’re not allowed to complain about whether it’s fair or not.”
“Fine,” Pat snaps, “but you’d better put everything in there. No leaving off a value for being named star just because you’re bitter about it.”
“Anything else?”
Pat tilts his head back and chews on his lip, thinking for a minute. “Maybe leave off shots taken? Because sometimes that could mean you made a good shot that the goalie just was able to block, and sometimes it could mean you’re shooting like shit, and trying to assign points for whether each shot was good or not could get really annoying.”
Jonny pushes his ball cap down lower across his eyes, nods once, then grabs his gear.
Patrick gets a text from him at two in the goddamn morning that appears to be a photo of some kind of chart. His phone buzzing wakes him up, and he scrunches his face up as he tries to decipher it. There’s columns and subcolumns over on the side that appear to be a key, and…
Pat twitches. It’s color coded. Apparently all of his own stats are in pink; Jonny’s are a perfectly respectful shade of green.
‘y didnt u use hawks colors’ he texts back.
‘I needed the black to outline the chart. It was the most neutral option,’ Jonny sends back a few minutes later. Pat groans.
It looks like Jonny’s taken everything into account - there’s columns across the top for game stars, goals, assists, shootout wins, and penalties taken. Of course Jonny’s been thorough enough to add penalties into the scoring system. There’s a column at the end for their total scores, rows over on the left listed by game date and opponent, and all of their games through the end of November have carefully been filled in. It looks like Jonny wrote it all out on hotel stationary with the Sharpies they all carry for signings, though who knows where he’d gotten the colored pens.
Pat checks over the key on the left side carefully. He’d expected that Jonny might just use the NHL’s point system, but of course he’s decided to be an overachiever and design his own. Jonny’s assigned different values to each category by some value system that makes sense only to him. Pat doesn’t want to fight with him over it too much as long as they seem reasonable. Goals are worth five points each, assists two, and one for a successful shootout. That’s fine. There’s a two point loss per penalty, which also seems fair enough. What cracks him up, though, is that Jonny has weighed the point assignment heavily towards the game star awards, probably to avoid Pat giving him shit over it - first star is worth six points, second star is worth four, and third star is worth two. That would have given him nine points tonight to Jonny’s five, so Pat’s down with this system.
‘u owe me a compliment for tonite,’ he sends back.
‘The bet doesn’t start until we both agree to the scoring system, Patrick. Try harder next game.’
That won’t be too hard, Pat thinks - their next game is against the Wild.
---
They lose to the Wild.
They lose to the fucking Wild, and Pat would be seeing red if not for the fact that he still manages to beat Jonny at his own ridiculously complicated scoring system.
“Five to two, motherfucker,” he tells Jonny cheerfully. “You know what that means.”
“Uh,” says Sharpy. “It was five to three actually, and in case you’ve forgotten, we were not the five.” Pat waves him off, crowding into Jonny’s space.
“C’mon, Jonny,” he wheedles, “pony up.”
Pat’s expecting something boring and technical along the lines of “your stick handling was excellent” or “good job getting past that defense.” Jonny’s captain speeches tend to be more about cheering them on and reassuring them that they’re a solid, in sync whole rather than complimenting individual players. He saves anything specific for the post-game press and even then it’s usually talk about how a particular play rather than a player’s overall work was beautiful. The biggest compliments he gets from Jonny are an affectionate celebratory hug or a declaration to the media that he’d really come through for the team.
With how bitchy Jonny’s been lately though, the best he may get tonight is “you’re not the reason we lost for once.” If Jonny comes back with something passive-aggressive like that, Pat’s calling party foul; he did require that they be good compliments as part of the bet, and he’s only willing to give Jonny’s emotional incompetence so much wiggle room.
What Patrick is not prepared for is Jonny pulling on his coat, leaning his head just over Pat’s shoulder to break eye contact, and then telling him that when he managed to swerve out to avoid that hit he was so graceful that he looked like he was soaring.
Pat doesn’t think anyone can blame him for the way he stands there shell shocked until the rest of the team’s left and the janitor is grumbling about needing to lock up. If anyone else on the team had heard it, they’d be fucked up too.
---
They crush the Wild next game in retribution, and Pat can’t help but tally the points up in the shower afterwards even though he already knows he did better than Jonny again. He’s got 11 points by Jonny’s scoring system. They’d put Saad on the second line with him and Pirri for a full game for the first time and it was like something had finally clicked.
He’s not sure what to expect this time if five points got him that… whatever the hell that was last game. It’s got to just be Jonny being a hyper-competitive asshole like he always is. Thing is, though, Jonny’s never been a good liar, and if he was able to say that convincingly enough that Pat couldn’t call him on it then he actually meant it.
If that’s the sort of thing Jonny’s been thinking about his playing and just not saying out loud before, that’s….
Pat’s not sure what to make of any of it.
He’s never been one to back down from a challenge either, though, so he makes himself stop stalling and get out of the showers. Jonny’s waiting right outside the door to the locker room and he nearly gives Patrick a heart attack; he startles and takes a step back on impulse. Jonny just stands firm, giving him the same expression he uses when he blanks out the media.
“So…” Pat starts, since Jonny isn’t saying anything. “Saader is working really well on my line. Maybe Q can keep putting him with us and-”
“Yeah,” Jonny cuts him off. “Saad played well tonight. You made the game for us, though.” That’s unfair to Saader, who’d gone above and beyond tonight with tracking their line on the ice and had passed him the puck for his goal in the third. Pat’s about to open his mouth and complain, because he really does want to keep Saader in there if they’re gonna keep meshing this well, but Jonny rocks forward on his toes so he’s pushing into Pat’s space again.
“You’re the one who holds us together, though. You always come through for us just when we need you.”
Then Jonny’s gone, walking back to the locker room and leaving Patrick there to lean back against the wall and wonder why it feels like he just took a puck to the chest.
---
All game winning streaks must come to an end, and so too must Pat’s winning streak in their little competition. He just wishes he hadn’t lost this one so brutally. He’d been practically useless tonight on the ice against the Senators, no goals or assists, and it’s hard to celebrate with the rest of the team. Patrick makes himself get the fuck over it, though - Jonny got first star and a hat trick tonight, and he played like he’d sacrificed his first game-scoring puck to Gretzky and the hockey gods. Pat’s proud of him, the whole team is.
Everyone’s celebrating in the locker room, feeding off each other’s excitement, and it’s not long before they’re all piling into cabs to go out and celebrate. Patrick finds himself packed in between Jonny and Hossa in their insistence that he’s the only one small enough to fit into the middle seat which, honestly, fuck them both. It means he’s pressed tightly up against Jonny’s thigh. His seat belt is stuck somewhere under Hossa’s ass and Pat isn’t gonna reach under there to dig it out, so he braces himself with one hand against the back of the cabbie’s seat. He still sways when they take the corner too sharply. Suddenly Jonny’s arm is across his chest, pressing him firmly back into his own seat. He leaves it there when they’ve pulled up at the bar until Pat bats it away so he can get his wallet and pay the cabbie.
Jonny squeezes out of the cab right behind Pat and presses up against his back for a moment before he slams the door closed. Then he’s herding Pat into the bar with one hand on the small of his back.
Pat just rolls his eyes. Jonny is so fucking weird when he’s in team spirit mode.
Jonny spends most of the night giving increasingly drunken advice to the rookies. He’s more relaxed and loose than Patrick’s seen him in a long time, and he’s glad that the good game seems to be helping his mood. He’s getting into that really drunk stage where he makes too many hand gestures when he talks, and Pat has to cut him off when he knocks Hossa’s drink over and creates a domino effect on their table.
“Okay,” Pat tells him, affectionately messing up Jonny’s hair, “time to go home.”
Pat’s barely tipsy, but he’s in a good enough mood to not immediately shove Jonny off when he leans into his shoulder out on the curb and mumbles something into his curls. “What was that, buddy?” he asks, sticking his hand out to try and flag down a cab. Jonny turns his face to the side, lips brushing Pat’s neck, and says “You’re good even when you don’t score.”
Pat laughs a little, uncomfortable, and pushes at Jonny until he’s mostly upright. “I didn’t play better than you tonight, Jonny, you don’t owe me a compliment. Don’t strain yourself.”
Jonny looks sulky, but Pat herds him into the cab that’s just pulled over and gives the driver Jonny’s home address before either of them can make this any more awkward.
“Jonny’s being weird,” he whines at Erica over Skype the next morning. She raises one eyebrow at him and then goes back to painting her nails.
“Weirder than usual,” he clarifies.
It’s an important distinction.
“Isn’t he just weird about everything?”
“No, I mean, he’s being weird about me this time instead of like, the nutritional plan or how everyone stores their equipment.”
Erica screws the cap back onto her nail polish and sets it back down. “Patty,” she says dryly, “I have some bad news. Jonny is weird at you about you doing all of those things already.”
Pat sighs. He didn’t want to have to spell this out, but she’s not getting it.
“No, I mean he’s all touchy feely with me like he’s forgotten that personal space exists.” He is absolutely not explaining their bet, no matter how much he could use some advice right now. There are limits.
Erica is giving him a judgemental look, he thinks. It’s hard to tell when the video is so grainy. “And this is different from you two practically sitting in each other’s laps while playing video games how, exactly?”
“It just - it feels different.”
She frowns, but leans forward towards the camera nonetheless. “If you actually want me to say something helpful and not just listen to you complain, you’re gonna have to be more specific than that, Pat.”
He weighs his options. Erica’s better at people stuff than him - he’s fantastic at befriending people or charming them in interviews, for sure, but sometimes it’s hard for him to pick up on more subtle social cues. Hockey players are usually pretty blunt so he doesn’t have much practice with it. She might actually be able to help. On the flip side, she’ll also tell their entire family if he’s being an idiot. It’s Jonny though, and that means it’s important; he wants to know what’s going on.
“Just… okay. Last night he was all handsy because he was drunk, but before that he kept herding me around with his hand on my lower back, like, pushing me around in the bar and stuff.”
Erica is doing her level best not to laugh at him.
“Patty, I’m going to sit here and finish painting these stripes on my nails but while I’m doing that I want you to think really hard about the girls you’ve herded around like that.”
“What the fuck,” he grumbles, because that’s the world’s least helpful advice. He’s only done that on dates or with girlfriends, because that’s the only time he’s felt like he had the right to do something that proprietary with -
“Oh my god!” he squeaks out and hangs up on Erica just as she cracks up.
‘I rly hate u rite now,’ he texts her later, face still burning.
‘No, you love me, now go hit that,’ she sends back, because she’s actually the worst.
[ Part 2]